A TRAVELLER IN 
LITTLE THINGS 



WORKS OF W. E. HUDSON 

THE PURPLE LAND 

Introduction by Theodore Roosevelt 

A CRYSTAL AGE 

Foreword by Clifford Smyth 

DEAD MAN'S PLACK and 

AN OLD THORN 

BIRDS IN TOWN AND VILLAGE 

Illustrated in color 

ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 

Head and Tail Pieces after Bewick 

BIRDS OF LA PLATA (2 vols.) 

Superbly Illustrated 

FAR AWAY AND LONG AGO 

With Photograviure Portrait 

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA 

Fully Illustrated 

A SHEPHERD'S LIFE 

Fully Illustrated 



E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 



A TRAVELLER IN 
LITTLE THINGS 



BY 

W. H. HUDSON 

Author of " The Purple Land," 
" Far Away and Long Ago," etc. 




NEW YORK 

E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 

68i FIFTH AVENUE 



Copyright, 1921, 
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

All rights reserved 



^^% 

^P'^ ^ 

W'^^ 



^CI.A62?591 
NOV -5 1921 



Printed in the United States of America 



NOTE 

Of the sketches contained in this 
volume, fourteen have appeared in 
the following periodicals: The New 
Statesman, The Saturday Review, The 
Nation, and The Cornhill Magazine 



viii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

XXVI. The Story of a Skull 221 

XXVII. A Story of a Walnut 230 

XXVIII. A Story of a Jackdaw 236 

XXIX. A Wonderful Story of a Mackerel . . 248 

XXX. Strangers Yet 257 

XXXI. The Return of the Chiff-chaff . . . 263 
XXXII. A Wasp at Table 273 

XXXIII. Wasps and Men 481 

XXXIV. In Chitterne Churchyard . . . .293 
XXXV. A Haunter of Churchyards .... 301 

XXXVI. The Dead and the Living .... 321 
XXXVII. A Story of Three Poems 331 



A TRAVELLER IN 
LITTLE THINGS 



A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE 
THINGS 

I 

HOW I FOUND MY TITLE 

IT is surely a rare experience for an unclassi- 
fied man, past middle age, to hear himself 
accurately and aptly described for the first time 
ifi his life by a perfect stranger! This thing 
happened to me at Bristol, some time ago, in the 
way I am about to relate. I slept at a Commer- 
cial Hotel, and early next morning was joined 
in the big empty coffee-room, smelling of stale 
tobacco, by an intensely respectable-looking old 
gentleman, whose hair was of silvery whiteness, 
and who wore gold-rimmed spectacles and a 
heavy gold watch-chain with many seals at- 
tached thereto; whose linen was of the finest, 
and whose outer garments, including the 
trousers, were of the newest and blackest broad- 
cloth. A glossier and at the same time a more 



2 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

venerable-looking "commercial" I had never 
seen in the west country, nor anywhere in the 
three kingdoms. He could not have improved 
his appearance if he had been on his way to 
attend the funeral of a millionaire. But with 
all his superior look he was quite affable, and 
talked fluently and instructively on a variety of 
themes, including trade, politics, and religion. 
Perceiving that he had taken me for what I was 
not — one of the army in which he served, but of 
inferior rank — I listened respectfully as became 
me. Finally he led the talk to the subject of 
agriculture, and the condition and prospects of 
farming in England. Here I perceived that he 
was on wholly unfamiliar ground, and in return 
for the valuable information he had given me on 
other and more important subjects, I proceeded 
to enlighten him. When I had finished stating 
my facts and views, he said: "I perceive that 
you know a great deal more about the matter 
than I. do, and I will now tell you why you know 
more. You are a traveller in little things — in 
something very small — which takes you into the 
villages and hamlets, where you meet and con- 
verse with small farmers, innkeepers, labourers 



HOW I FOUND MY TITLE 3 

and their wives, with other persons who live on 
the land. In this way you get to hear a good 
deal about rent and cost of living, and what the 
people are able and not able to do. Now I am 
out of all that; I never go to a village nor see a 
farmer. I am a traveller in something very 
large. In the south and west I visit towns like 
Salisbury, Exeter, Bristol, Southampton; then I 
go to the big towns in the Midlands and the 
North, and to Glasgow and Edinburgh; and 
afterwards to Belfast and Dublin. It would 
simply be a waste of time for me to visit a town 
of less than fifty or sixty thousand inhabitants." 

He then gave me some particulars concerning 
the large thing he travelled in; and when I had 
expressed all the interest and admiration the 
subject called for, he condescendingly invited 
me to tell him something about my own small 
line. 

Now this was wrong of him; it was a distinct 
contravention of an unwritten law among "Com- 
mercials" that no person must be interrogated 
concerning the nature of his business. The big 
and the little man, once inside the hostel, which 
is their club as well, are on an equality. I did 



4 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

not remind my questioner of this — I merely 
smiled and said nothing, and he of course under- 
stood and respected my reticence. With a 
pleasant nod and a condescending let-us-say-no- 
more-about-it wave of the hand he passed on to 
other matters. 

Notwithstanding that I was amused at his 
mistake, the label he had supplied me with was 
something to be grateful for, and I am now find- 
ing a use for it. And I think that if he, my la- 
beller, should see this sketch by chance and 
recognise himself in it, he will say with his 
pleasant smile and wave of the hand, "Oh, that's 
his line! Yes, yes, I described him rightly 
enough, thinking it haberdashery or floral texts 
for cottage bedrooms, or something of that kind; 
I didn't imagine he was a traveller in anything 
quite so small as this." 



II 

THE OLD MAN'S DELUSION 

WE know that our senses are subject to de- 
cay, that from our middle years they 
are decaying all the time; but happily it is as if 
we didn't know and didn't believe. The process 
is too gradual to trouble us; we can only say, at 
fifty or sixty or seventy, that it is doubtless the 
case that we can't see as far or as well, or hear 
or smell as sharply, as we did a decade ago, but 
that we don't notice the difference. Lately I 
met an extreme case, that of a man well past 
seventy who did not appear to know that his 
senses had faded at all. He noticed that the 
world was not what it had been to him, as it had 
appeared, for example, when he was a plough- 
boy, the time of his life he remembered most 
vividly, but it was not the fault of his senses; the 
mirror was all right, it was the world that had 
grown dim. 

I found him at the gate where I was accus- 

5 



.6 TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

tomed to go of an evening to watch the sun set 
over the sea of yellow corn and the high green 
elms beyond, which divide the cornfields from 
the Maidenhead Thicket. An old agricultural 
labourer, he had a grey face and grey hair and 
throat-beard; he stooped a good deal, and struck 
me as being very feeble and long past work. But 
he told me that he still did some work in the 
fields. The older farmers who had employed 
him for many years past gave him a little to do; 
he also had his old-age pension, and his children 
helped to keep him in comfort. He was quite 
well off, he said, compared to many. There was 
a subdued and sombre cheerfulness in him, and 
when I questioned him about his early life, he 
talked very freely in his slow old peasant way. 
He was born in a village in the Vale of Ayles- 
bury, and began work as a ploughboy on a very 
big farm. He had a good master and was well 
fed, the food being bacon, vegetables, and home- 
made bread, also suet pudding three times a 
week. But what he remembered best was a rice 
pudding which came by chance in his way dur- 
ing his first year on the farm. There was some 
of the pudding left in a dish after the family 



THE OLD MAN'S DELUSION 7 

had dined, and the farmer said to his wife, "Give 
it to the boy" ; so he had it, and never tasted any- 
thing so nice in all his life. How he enjoyed 
that pudding! He remembered it now as if it 
had been yesterday, though it was sixty-five 
years ago. 

He then went on to talk of the changes that 
had been going on in the world since that happy 
time; but the greatest change of all was in the 
appearance of things. He had had a hard life, 
and the hardest time was when he was a plough- 
boy and had to work so hard that he was tired 
to death at the end of every day; yet at four 
o'clock in the morning he was ready and glad 
to get up and go out to work all day again be- 
cause everything looked so bright, and it made 
him happy just to look up at the sky and listen 
to the birds. In those days there were larks. 
The number of larks was wonderful; the sound 
of their singing filled the whole air. He didn't 
want any greater happiness than to hear them 
singing over his head. A few days ago, not more 
than half a mile from where we were standing, 
he was crossing a field when a lark got up sing- 
ing near him and went singing over his head. 



8 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

He stopped to listen and said to himself, "Well 
now, that do remind me of old times!" 

"For you know," he went on, ''it is a rare 
thing to hear a lark now. What's become of all 
the birds I used to see I don't know. I remem- 
ber there was a very pretty bird at that time 
called the yellow-hammer — a bird all a shining 
yellow, the prettiest of all the birds." He never 
saw nor heard that bird now, he assured me. 

That was how the old man talked, and I never 
told him that yellow hammers could be seen and 
heard all day long anywhere on the common be- 
yond the green wall of the elms, and that a lark 
was singing loudly high up over our heads while 
he was talking of the larks he had listened to 
sixty- five years ago in the Vale of Aylesbury, 
and saying that it was a rare thing to hear that 
bird now. 



Ill 

AS A TREE FALLS 

AT the Green Dragon, where I refreshed my- 
^ self at noon with bread and cheese and 
beer, I was startlingly reminded of a simple and, 
I suppose, familiar psychological fact, yet one 
which we are never conscious of except at rare 
moments when by chance it is thrust upon us. 

There are many Green Dragons in this world 
of wayside inns, even as there are many White 
Harts, Red Lions, Silent Women and other in- 
credible things; but when I add that my inn is 
in a Wiltshire village, the headquarters of cer- 
tain gentlemen who follow a form of sport 
which has long been practically obsolete in this 
country, and indeed throughout the civilised 
world, some of my readers will have no diffi- 
culty in identifying it. 

After lunching I had an hour's pleasant con- 
versation with the genial landlord and his 
buxom good-looking wife; they were both na- 

9 



lo A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

tives of a New Forest village and glad to talk 
about it with one who knew it intimately. Dur- 
ing our talk I happened to use the words — I for- 
get what about — "As a tree falls so must it lie." 
The landlady turned on me her dark Hamp- 
shire eyes with a sudden startled and pained 
look in them, and cried: "Oh, please don't say 
that!' 

"Why not?" I asked. "It is in the Bible, and 
a quite common saying." 

"I know," she returned, "but I can't bear it — 
I hate to hear it!" 

She would say no more, but my curiosity was 
stirred, and I set about persuading her to tell 
me. "Ah, yes," I said, "I can guess why. It's 
something in your past life — a sad story of one 
of your family — one very much loved perhaps — 
who got into trouble and was refused all help 
from those who might have saved him." 

"No," she said, "it all happened before my 
time — long before. I never knew her." And 
then presently she told me the story. 

When her father was a young man he lived 
and worked with his father, a farmer in Hamp- 
shire and a widower. There were several 



AS A TREE FALLS ii 

brothers and sisters, and one of the sisters, 
named Eunice, was most loved by all of them 
and was her father's favourite on account of her 
beauty and sweet disposition. Unfortunately 
she became engaged to a young man who was 
not liked by the father, and when she refused to 
break her engagement to please him he was 
dreadfully angry and told her that if she went 
against him and threw herself away on that 
worthless fellow he would forbid her the house 
and would never see or speak to her again. 

Being of an affectionate disposition and fond 
of her father it grieved her sorely to disobey 
him, but her love compelled her, and by-and-by 
she went away and was married in a neighbour- 
ing village where her lover had his home. It 
was not a happy marriage, and after a few 
anxious years she fell into a wasting illness, and 
when it became known to her that she was near 
her end she sent a message by a brother to the 
old father to come and see her before she died. 
She had never ceased to love him, and her one 
insistent desire was to receive his forgiveness 
and blessing before finishing her life. His an- 
swer was, "As a tree falls so shall it lie." He 



12 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

would not go near her. Shortly afterwards the 
unhappy young wife passed away. 

The landlady added that the brother who had 
taken the message was her father, that he was 
now eighty-two years old and still spoke of his 
long dead and greatly loved sister, and always 
said he had never forgiven and would never 
forgive his father, dead half a century ago, for 
having refused to go to his dying daughter and 
for speaking those cruel words. 



IV 
''BLOOD" 

A STORY OF TWO BROTHERS 

A CERTAIN titled lady, great in the social 
world, was walking down the village 
street between two ladies of the village, and 
their conversation was about some person known 
to the two who had behaved in the noblest man- 
ner in difficult circumstances, and the talk ran 
on between the two like a duet, the great lady 
mostly silent and paying but little attention to 
it. At length the subject was exhausted, and as 
a proper conclusion to round the discourse off, 
one of them remarked : "It is what I have always 
said, — there's nothing like blood!" Whereupon 
the great person returned, "I don't agree with 
you: it strikes me you two are always praising 
blood, and I think it perfectly horrid. The very 
sight of a black pudding for instance turns me 
sick and makes me want to be a vegetarian." 

13 



14 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

The others smiled and laboriously explained 
that they were not praising blood as an article 
of diet, but had used the word in its other and 
partly metamorphical sense. They simply 
meant that as a rule persons of good blood or of 
old families had better qualities and a higher 
standard of conduct and action than others. 

The other listened and said nothing, for al- 
though of good blood herself she was an out- 
and-out democrat, a burning Radical, burning 
bright in the forests of the night of dark old 
England, and she considered that all these lofty 
notions about old families and higher standards 
were confined to those who knew little or noth- 
ing about the life of the upper classes. 

She, the aristocrat, was wrong, and the two 
village ladies, members of the middle class, were 
right, although they were without a sense of 
humour and did not know that their dis- 
tinguished friend was poking a little fun at them 
when she spoke about black puddings. 

They were right, and it was never necessary 
for Herbert Spencer to tell us that the world is 
right in looking for nobler motives and ideals, 
a higher standard of conduct, better, sweeter 



"BLOOD" 15 

manners, from those who are highly placed than 
from the ruck of men; and as this higher, better 
life, which is only possible in the leisured 
classes, is correlated with the "aspects which 
please," the regular features and personal 
beauty, the conclusion is the beauty and good- 
ness or "inward perfections" are correlated. 

All this is common, universal knowledge: to 
all men of all races and in all parts of the world 
it comes as a shock to hear that a person of a 
noble countenance has been guilty of an ignoble 
action. It is only the ugly (and bad) who 
fondly cherish the delusion that beauty doesn't 
matter, that it is only skin-deep and the rest of it. 

Here now arises a curious question, the sub- 
ject of this little paper. When a good old 
family, of good character, falls on evil days and 
is eventually submerged in the classes beneath, 
we know that the aspects which please, the good 
features and expression, will often persist for 
long generations. Now this submerging process 
is perpetually going on all over the land and so 
it has been for centuries. We notice from year 
to year the rise from the ranks of numberless 
men to the highest positions, who are our leaders 



1 6 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

and legislators, owners of great estates who 
found great families and receive titles. But we 
do not notice the corresponding decline and final 
disappearance of those who were highly placed, 
since this is a more gradual process and has 
nothing sensational about it. Yet the two proc- 
esses are equally great and far-reaching in their 
effects, and are like those two of Elaboration 
and Degeneration which go on side by side for 
ever in nature, in the animal world; and like 
darkness and light and heat and cold in the phys- 
ical world. 

As a fact, the country is full of the descend- 
ants of families that have "died out." How long 
it takes to blot out or blur the finer features and 
expression we do not know, and the time prob- 
ably varies according to the length of the period 
during which the family existed in its higher 
phase. The question which confronts us is: 
Does the higher or better nature, the "inward 
perfections" which are correlated with the as- 
pects which please, endure too, or do those who 
fall from their own class degenerate morally to 
the level of the people they live and are one 
with? 



"BLOOD" 17 

It is a nice question. In Sussex, with Mr. M. 
A. Lower, who has written about the vanished 
or submerged families of that county, for my 
guide as to names, I have sought out persons of 
a very humble condition, some who were shep- 
herds and agricultural labourers, and have been 
surprised at the good faces of many of them, the 
fine, even noble, features and expression, and 
with these an exceptionally fine character. La- 
bourers on the lands that were once owned by 
their forefathers, and children of long genera- 
tions of labourers, yet still exhibiting the marks 
of their aristocratic descent, the fine features 
and expression and the fine moral qualities with 
which they are correlated. 

I will now give in illustration an old South 
American experience, an example, which deeply 
impressed me at the time, of the sharp contrast 
between a remote descendant of aristocrats and 
a child of the people in a country where class 
distinctions have long ceased to exist. 

It happened that I went to stay at a cattle 
ranch for two or three months one summer, in 
a part of the country new to me, where I knew 
scarcely anyone. It was a good spot for my pur- 



i8 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

pose, which was bird study, and this wholly oc- 
cupied my mind. By-and-by I heard about two 
brothers, aged respectively twenty-three and 
twenty-four years, who lived in the neighbour- 
hood on a cattle ranch inherited from their 
father, who had died young. They had no rela- 
tions and were the last of their name in that part 
of the country, and their grazing land was but a 
remnant of the estate as it had been a century 
before. The name of the brothers first attracted 
my attention, for it was that of an old highly- 
distinguished family of Spain, two or three of 
whose adventurous sons had gone to South 
America early in the seventeenth century to seek 
their fortunes, and had settled there. The real 
name need not be stated: I will call it de la 
Rosa, which will serve as well as another. 
Knowing something of the ancient history of 
the family I became curious to meet the 
brothers, just to see what sort of men they were 
who had blue blood and yet lived, as their for- 
bears had done for generations, in the rough 
primitive manner of the gauchos — the cattle- 
tending horsemen of the pampas. A little later 
I met the younger brother at a house in the vil- 



"BLOOD" 19 

lage a few miles from the ranch I was staying 
at. His name was Cyril; the elder was Am- 
brose. He was certainly a very fine fellow in 
appearance, tall and strongly built, with a high 
colour on his open genial countenance and a 
smile always playing about the corners of his 
rather large sensual mouth and in his greenish- 
hazel eyes; but of the noble ancestry there was 
no faintest trace. His features were those of the 
unameliorated peasant, as he may be seen in any 
European country, and in this country, in Ire- 
land particularly, but with us he is not so com- 
mon. It would seem that in England there is a 
larger mixture of better blood, or that the im- 
provements in features due to improved condi- 
tions, physical and moral, have gone further. 
At all events, one may look at a crowd anywhere 
\n England and see only a face here and there of 
the unmodified plebeian type. In a very large 
majority the forehead will be less low and nar- 
row, the nose less coarse with less wide-spread- 
ing alae, the depression in the bridge not so deep, 
the mouth not so large nor the jowl so heavy. 
These marks of the unimproved adult are pres- 
ent in all infants at birth. Lady Clara Vere de 



20 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Verc's little bantling is in a sense not hers at all 
but the child of some ugly antique race; of a 
Palaeolithic mother, let us say, who lived before 
the last Glacial epoch and was not very much 
better-looking herself than an orang-utan. It is 
only when the bony and cartilaginous frame- 
work, with the muscular covering of the face, 
becomes modified, and the wrinkled brown 
visage of the ancient pigmy grows white and 
smooth, that it can be recognised as Lady Clara's 
own offspring. The infant is ugly, and where 
the infantile features survive in the adult the 
man is and must be ugly too, unless the expres- 
sion is good. Thus, we may know numbers of 
persons who would certainly be ugly but for 
the redeeming expression; and this good expres- 
sion, which is "feature in the making," is, like 
good features, an "outward sign of inward per- 
fections." 

To continue with the description of my young 
gentleman of blue blood and plebeian counte- 
nance, his expression not only saved him from 
ugliness but made him singularly attractive, it 
revealed a good nature, friendliness, love of his 
fellows, sincerity, and other pleasing qualities. 



"BLOOD" 21 

After meeting and conversing with him I was 
not surprised to hear that he was universally 
liked, but regarding him critically I could not 
say that his manner was perfect. He was too 
self-conscious, too anxious to shine, too vain of 
his personal appearance, of his wit, his rich 
dress, his position as a de la Rosa and a land- 
owner. There was even a vulgarity in him, such 
as one looks for in a person risen from the lower 
orders but does not expect in the descendant of 
an ancient and once lustrous family, however 
much decayed and impoverished, or submerged. 
Shortly afterwards a gossipy old native estan- 
ciero, who lived close by, while sitting in our 
kitchen sipping mate, began talking freely about 
his neighbour's lives and characters, and I told 
him I had felt interested in the brothers de la 
Rosa; partly on account of the great affection 
these two had for one another, which was like 
an ideal friendship; and in part too on account 
of the ancient history of the family they came 
from. I had met one of them, I told him, — 
Cyril — a very fine fellow, but in some respects 
he was not exactly like my preconceived idea of 
a de la Rosa. 



22 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

"No, and he isn't one!" shouted the old fel- 
low, with a great laugh; and more than de- 
lighted at having a subject presented to him 
and at his capture of a fresh listener, he pro- 
ceeded to give me an intimate history of the 
brothers. 

The father, who was a fine and a lovable 
man, married early, and his young wife died in 
giving birth to their only child — Ambrose. He 
did not marry again: he was exceedingly fond 
of his child and was both father and mother to 
it and kept it with him until the boy was about 
nine years old, and then determined to send him 
to Buenos Ayres to give him a year's schooling. 
He himself had been taught to read as a small 
boy, also to write a letter, but he did not think 
himself equal to teach the boy, and so for a time 
they would have to be separated. 

Meanwhile the boy had picked up with Cyril, 
a little waif in rags, the bastard child of a 
woman who had gone away and left him in 
infancy to the mercy of others. He had been 
reared in the hovel of a poor gaucho on the de la 
Rosa land, but the poor orphan, although the 
dirtiest, raggedest, most mischievous little beg- 



"BLOOD" 23 

gar in the land, was an attractive child, intelli- 
gent, full of fun, and of an adventurous spirit. 
Half his days were spent miles from home, wad- 
ing through the vast reedy and rushy marshes 
in the neighbourhood, hunting for birds' nests. 
Little Ambrose, with no child companion at 
home, where his life had been made too soft for 
him, was exceedingly happy with his wild com- 
panion, and they were often absent together in 
the marshes for a whole day, to the great anxiety 
of the father. But he could not separate them, 
because he could not endure to see the misery 
of his boy when they were forcibly kept apart. 
Nor could he forbid his child from heaping 
gifts in food and clothes and toys or whatever 
he had, on his little playmate. Nor did the 
trouble cease when the time came now for the 
boy to be sent from home to learn his letters: his 
grief at the prospect of being separated from 
his companion was too much for the father, and 
he eventually sent them together to the city, 
where they spent a year or two and came back as 
devoted to one another as when they went away. 
From that time Cyril lived with them, and 
eventually de la Rosa adopted him, and to make 



24 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

his son happy he left all he possessed to be 
equally divided at his death between them. He 
was in bad health, and died when Ambrose was 
fifteen and Cyril fourteen; from that time they 
were their own masters and refused to have any 
division of their inheritance but continued to 
live together; and had so continued for upwards 
of ten years. 

Shortly after hearing this history I met the 
brothers together at a house in the village, and 
a greater contrast between two men it would be 
impossible to imagine. They were alike only 
in both being big, well-shaped, handsome, and 
well-dressed men, but in their faces they had the 
stamp of widely separated classes, and differed 
as much as if they had belonged to distinct spe- 
cies. Cyril, with a coarse, high-coloured skin 
and the primitive features I have described; 
Ambrose, with a pale dark skin of a silky tex- 
ture, an oval face and classic features — fore- 
head, nose, mouth and chin, and his ears small 
and lying against his head, not sticking out like 
handles as in his brother; he had black hair and 
grey eyes. It was the face of an aristocrat, of a 
man of blue blood, or of good blood, of an an- 



"BLOOD" 25 

cient family; and in his manner too he was a 
perfect contrast to his brother and friend. There 
was no trace of vulgarity in him; he was not 
self-conscious, not anxious to shine; he was mod- 
esty itself, and in his speech and manner and 
appearance he was, to put it all in one word, a 
gentleman. 

Seeing them together I was more amazed 
than ever at the fact of their extraordinary affec- 
tion for each other, their perfect amity which 
had lasted so many years without a rift, which 
nothing could break, as people said, except a 
woman. 

But the woman who would break or shatter 
it had not yet appeared on the horizon, nor do I 
know whether she ever appeared or not, since 
after leaving the neighbourhood I heard no 
more of the brothers de la Rosa. 



V 

A STORY OF LONG DESCENT 

IT was rudely borne in upon me that there 
was another side to the shield. I was too 
much immersed in my own thoughts to note the 
peculiar character of the small remote old- 
world town I came to in the afternoon; next 
day was Sunday, and on ray way to the church 
to attend morning service, it struck me as one 
of the oldest-looking of the small old towns I 
had stumbled upon in my rambles in this 
ancient land. There was the wide vacant space 
where doubtless meetings had taken place for a 
thousand years, and the steep narrow crooked 
mediaeval streets, and here and there some 
stately building rising like a castle above the 
humble cottage houses clustering round it as if 
for protection. Best of all was the church with 
its noble tower where a peal of big bells were 
just now flooding the whole place with their 
glorious noise. 

It was even better when, inside, I rose from 

26 



A STORY OF LONG DESCENT 2^ 

my knees and looked about me, to find myself in 
an ideal interior, the kind I love best; rich in 
metal and glass and old carved w^ood, the orna- 
ments which the good Methody would scorn- 
fully put in the hay and stubble category, but 
which owing to long use and associations have 
acquired for others a symbolic and spiritual 
significance. The beauty and richness were all 
the fresher for the dimness, and the light was 
dim because it filtered through old oxydised 
stained glass of that unparalleled loveliness of 
colour which time alone can impart. It was, 
excepting in vastness, like a cathedral interior, 
and in some ways better than even the best of 
these great fanes, wonderful as they are. Here, 
recalling them, one could venture to criticise 
and name their several deficits: — a Wells di- 
vided, a ponderous Ely, a vacant and cold Can- 
terbury, a too light and airy Salisbury, and so 
on even to Exeter, supreme in beauty, spoilt 
by a monstrous organ in the wrong place. That 
wood and metal giant, standing as a stone bridge 
to mock the eyes' efforts to dodge past it and 
have sight of the exquisite choir beyond, and 
of an east window through which the humble 



28 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

worshipper in the nave might hope, in some 
rare mystical moment, to catch a glimpse of the 
far Heavenly country beyond. 

I also noticed when looking round that it was 
an interior rich in memorials to the long dead 
— old brasses and stone tablets on the walls, and 
some large monuments. By chance the most im- 
posing of the tombs was so near my seat that 
with little difficulty I succeeded in reading and 
committing to memory the whole contents of 
the very long inscription cut in deep letters on 
the hard white stone. It was to the memory of 
Sir Ranulph Damarell, who died in 1531, and 
was the head of a family long settled in those 
parts, lord of the manor and many other things. 
On more than one occasion he raised a troop 
from his own people and commanded it himself, 
fighting for his king and country both in and 
out of England. He was, moreover, a friend 
of the king and his counsellor, and universally 
esteemed for his virtues and valour; greatly 
loved by all his people, especially by the poor 
and suffering, on account of his generosity and 
kindness of heart. 

A very glorious record, and by-and-by I be- 



A STORY OF LONG DESCENT 29 

lieved every word of it. For after reading the 
inscription I began to examine the effigy in 
marble of the man himself which surmounted 
the tomb. He was lying extended full length, 
six feet and five inches, his head on a low pil- 
low, his right hand grasping the handle of his 
drawn sword. The more I looked at it, both 
during and after the service, the more convinced 
I became that this was no mere conventional 
figure made by some lapidary long after the sub- 
ject's death, but was the work of an inspired 
artist, an exact portrait of the man, even to his 
stature, and that he had succeeded in giving to 
the countenance the very expression of the liv- 
ing Sir Ranulph. And what it expressed was 
power and authority and, with it, spirituality. 
A noble countenance with a fine forehead and 
nose, the lower part of the face covered with 
the beard, and long hair that fell to the shoulders. 
It produced a feeling such as I have when- 
ever I stand before a certain sixteenth-century 
portrait in the National Gallery: a sense or an 
illusion of being in the presence of a living 
person with whom I am engaged in a wordless 
conversation, and who is revealing his inmost 



30 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

soul to me. And it is only the work of a genius 
that can affect you in that way. 

Quitting the church I remembered with sat- 
isfaction that my hostess at the quiet home-like 
family hotel where I had put up, was an edu- 
cated intelligent woman (good-looking, too), 
and that she would no doubt be able to tell me 
something of the old history of the town and 
particularly of Sir Ranulph. For this marble 
man, this knight of ancient days, had taken pos- 
session of me and I could think of nothing else. 

At luncheon we met as in a private house at 
our table with our nice hostess at the head, and 
beside her three or four guests staying in the 
house; a few day visitors to the town came in 
and joined us. Next to me I had a young New 
Zealand officer whose story I had heard with 
painful interest the previous evening. Like so 
many of the New Zealanders I had met before, 
he was a splendid young fellow; but he had been 
terribly gassed at the front and had been told 
by the doctors that he would not be fit to go back 
even if the war lasted another year, and we were 
then well through the third. The way the poi- 
son in his lungs affected him was curious. He 



A STORY OF LONG DESCENT 31 

had his bad periods when for a fortnight or so 
he would lie in his hospital suffering much and 
terribly depressed, and at such time black spots 
would appear all over his chest and neck and 
arms so that he would be spotted like a pard. 
Then the spots would fade and he would rise 
apparently well, and being of an energetic dis- 
position, was allowed to do local war work. 

On the other side of the table facing us sat a 
lady and gentleman who had come in together 
for luncheon. A slim lady of about thirty, with 
a well-shaped but colourless face and very 
bright intelligent eyes. She was a lively talker, 
but her companion, a short fat man with a round 
apple face and cheeks of an intensely red colour 
and a black moustache, was reticent, and when 
addressed directly replied in monosyllables. 
He gave his undivided attention to the thing 
on his plate. 

The young officer talked to me of his country, 
describing with enthusiasm his own district 
which he averred contained the finest mountain 
and forest scenery in New Zealand. The lady 
sitting opposite began to listen and soon cut in 
to say she knew it all well, and agreed in all he 



32 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

said in praise of the scenery. She had spent 
weeks of delight among those great forests and 
mountains. Was she then his country-woman? 
he asked. Oh, no, she was English but had 
travelled extensively and knew a great deal of 
New Zealand. And after exhausting this sub- 
ject the conversation, which had become gen- 
eral, drifted into others, and presently we were 
all comparing notes about our experience of the 
late great frost. Here I had my say about what 
had happened in the village I had been staying 
in. The prolonged frost, I said, had killed all 
or most of the birds in the open country round 
us, but in the village itself a curious thing had 
happened to save the birds of the place. It was 
a change of feeling in the people, who are by 
nature or training great persecutors of birds. 
The sight of them dying of starvation had 
aroused a sentiment of compassion, and all the 
villagers, men, women, and children, even to the 
roughest bush-beating boys, started feeding 
them, with the result that the birds quickly be- 
came tame and spent their whole day flying 
from house to house, visiting every yard and 
perching on the window-sills. 



A STORY OF LONG DESCENT S3 

While I was speaking the gentleman opposite 
put down his knife and fork and gazed steadily 
at me with a smile on his red-apple face, and 
when I concluded he exploded in a half-sup- 
pressed sniggerging laugh. 

It annoyed me, and I remarked rather sharply 
that I didn't see what there was to laugh at in 
what I had told them. Then the lady with 
ready tact interposed to say she had been deeply 
interested in my experiences, and went on to 
tell what she had done to save the birds in her 
own place; and her companion, taking it per- 
haps as a snub to himself from her, picked up 
his knife and fork and went on with his 
luncheon, and never opened his mouth to speak 
again. Or, at all events, not till he had quite 
finished his meal. 

By-and-by, when I found an opportunity of 
speaking to our hostess, I asked her who that 
charming lady was, and she told me she was a 
Miss Somebody — I forget the name — a native 
of the town, also that she was a great favourite 
there and was loved by everyone, rich and poor, 
and that she had been a very hard worker ever 



34 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

since the war began, and had inspired all the 
women in the place to work. 

"And who," I asked, "was the fellow who 
brought her in to lunch — a relative or a lover?" 

"Oh, no, no relation and certainly not a lover. 
I doubt if she would have him if he wanted her, 
in spite of his position." 

"I don't wonder at that — a perfect clcwn! 
And who is he?" 

"Oh, didn't you know! Sir Ranulph Dama- 
rell." 

"Good Lord!" I gasped. "That your great 
man — lord of the manor and what not! He 
may bear the name, but I'm certain he's not a 
descendant of the Sir Ranulph whose monument 
is in your church." 

"Oh, yes, he is," she replied. "I believe there 
has never been a break in the line from father 
to son since that man's day. They were all 
knights in the old time, but for the last two 
centuries or so have been baronets." 

"Good Lord!" I exclaimed again. "And 
please tell me what is he — what does he do? 
What is his distinction?" 

"His distinction for me," she smilingly re- 



A STORY OF LONG DESCENT 35 

plied, "is that he prefers my house to have his 
luncheon in after Sunday morning service. He 
knows where he can get good cooking. And as 
a rule he invites some friend in the town to 
lunch with him, so that should there be any con- 
versation at table his guest can speak for both 
and leave him quite free to enjoy his food." 

"And what part does he take in politics and 
public affairs — how does he stand among your 
leading men?" 

Her answer was that he had never taken any 
part in politics — had never been or desired to be 
in Parliament or in the County Council, and 
was not even a J. P., nor had he done anything 
for his country during the war. Nor was he a 
sportsman. He was simply a country gentle- 
man, and every morning he took a ride or walk, 
mainly she supposed to give him a better ap- 
petite for his luncheon. And he was a good 
landlord to his tenants and he was respected by 
everybody and no one had ever said a word 
against him. 

There was nothing now for me to say except 
"Good Lord!" so I said it once more, and that 
made three times. 



VI 

A SECOND STORY OF TWO 
BROTHERS 

SHORTLY after writing the story of two 
brothers in the last part but one I was re- 
minded of another strange story of two brothers 
in that same distant land, which I heard years 
ago and had forgotten. It now came back to me 
in a newspaper from Miami, of all places in 
the world, sent me by a correspondent in that 
town. He — Mr. J. L. Rodger — some time ago 
when reading an autobiographical book of 
mine made the discovery that we were natives 
of the same place in the Argentine pampas — 
that the homes where we respectively first saw 
the light stood but a couple of hours' ride on 
horseback apart. But we were not born on the 
same day and so missed meeting in our youth; 
then left our homes, and he, after wide wander- 
ings, found an earthly paradise In Florida to 
dwell in. So that now that we have in a sense 
met we have the Atlantic between us. 

36 



A SECOND STORY OF TWO BROTHERS 37 

He has been contributing some recollections 
of the pampas to the Miami paper, and told this 
story of two brothers among other strange hap- 
penings. I tell it in my own way more briefly. 

It begins in the early fifties and ends thirty 
years later in the early eighties of last century. 
It then found its way into the Buenos Ayres 
newspapers, and I heard it at the time but had 
utterly forgotten it until this Florida paper 
came into my hand. 

In the fifties a Mr. Gilmour, a Scotch settler, 
had a sheep and cattle ranch on the pampas far 
south of Buenos Ayres, near the Atlantic coast. 
He lived there with his family, and one of the 
children, aged five, was a bright active little 
fellow and was regarded with affection by one 
of the hired native cattlemen, who taught the 
child to ride on a pony, and taught him so well 
that even at that tender age the boy could follow 
his teacher and guide at a fast gallop over the 
plain. One day Mr. Gilmour fell out with the 
man on account of some dereliction of duty, and 
after some hot words between them discharged 
him there and then. The young fellow mounted 



38 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

his horse and rode ofif vowing vengeance, and 
on that very day the child disappeared. The 
pony on which he had gone out riding came 
home, and as it was supposed that the little boy 
had been thrown or fallen off, a search was 
made all over the estate and continued for days 
without result. Eventually some of the child's 
clothing was found on the beach, and it was con- 
jectured that the young native had taken the 
child there and drowned him and left the 
clothes to let the Gilmours know that he had 
had his revenge. But there was room for doubt, 
as the body was never found, and they finally 
came to think that the clothes had been left 
there to deceive them, and that as the man had 
been so fond of the child he had carried him off. 
This belief started them on a wider and longer 
quest; they invoked the aid of the authori- 
ties all over the province; the loss of the child 
was advertised and a large reward offered for 
his recovery and agents were employed to look 
for him. In this search, which continued for 
years, Mr. Gilmour spent a large part of his 
fortune, and eventually it had to be dropped; 
and of all the family Mrs. Gilmour alone still 



A SECOND STORY OF TWO BROTHERS 39 

believed that her lost son was living, and still 
dreamed and hoped that she would see him 
again before her life ended. 

One day the Gilmours entertained a traveller, 
a native gentleman, who, as the custom was in 
my time on those great vacant plains where 
houses were far apart, had ridden up to the gate 
at noon and asked for hospitality. He was a 
man of education, a great traveller in the land, 
and at table entertained them with an account 
of some of the strange out-of-the-world places 
he had visited. 

Presently one of the sons of the house, a tall 
slim good-looking young man of about thirty, 
came in, and saluting the stranger took his seat 
at the table. Their guest started and seemed to 
be astonished at the sight of him, and after the 
conversation was resumed he continued from 
time to time to look with a puzzled questioning 
air at the young man. Mrs. Gilmour had ob- 
served this in him and, with the thought of her 
lost son ever in her mind, she became more and 
more agitated until, unable longer to contain 
her excitement, she burst out: "O, Sefior, why 
do you look at my son in that way? — tell me if 



40 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

by chance you have not met someone in your 
wanderings that was like him." 

Yes, he replied, he had met someone so like 
the young man before him that it had almost 
produced the illusion of his being the same 
person; that was why he had looked so search- 
ingly at him. 

Then in reply to their eager questions he told 
them that it was an old incident, that he had 
never spoken a word to the young man he had 
seen, and that he had only seen him once for a 
few minutes. The reason of his remembering 
him so well was that he had been struck by his 
appearance, so strangely incongruous in the cir- 
cumstances, and that had made him look very 
sharply at him. Over two years had passed 
since, but it was still distinct in his memory. He 
had come to a small frontier settlement, a mili- 
tary outpost, on the extreme north-eastern 
border of the Republic, and had seen the gar- 
rison turn out for exercise from the fort. It 
was composed of the class of men one usually 
saw in these border forts, men of the lowest 
type, miztiros and mulattos most of them, crim- 
inals from the gaols condemned to serve in the 



A SECOND STORY OF TWO BROTHERS 41 

frontier army for their crimes. And in the 
midst of the low-browed, swarthy-faced, ruf- 
fianly crew appeared the tall distinguished-look- 
ing young man with a white skin, blue eyes and 
light hair — an amazing contrast! 

That was all he could tell them, but it was a 
clue, the first they had had in thirty years, and 
when they told the story of the lost child to their 
guest he was convinced that it was their son he 
had seen — there could be no other explanation 
of the extraordinary resemblance between the 
two young men. At the same time he warned 
them that the search would be a difficult and 
probably a disappointing one, as these frontier 
garrisons were frequently changed: also that 
many of the men deserted whenever they got 
the chance, and that many of them got killed, 
either in fight with the Indians, or among them- 
selves over their cards, as gambling was their 
only recreation. 

But the old hope, long dead in all of them 
except in the mother's heart, was alive again, 
and the son, whose appearance had so strongly 
attracted their guest's attention, at once made 
ready to go out on that long journey. He went 



42 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

by way of Buenos Ayres where he was given a 
passport by the War Office and a letter to the 
Commanding Officer to discharge the blue-eyed 
soldier in the event of his being found and 
proved to be a brother to the person in quest of 
him. But when he got to the end of his journey 
on the confines of that vast country, after travel- 
ling many weeks on horseback, it was only to 
hear that the men who had formed the garrison 
two years before, had been long ordered away 
to another province where they had probably 
been called to aid in or suppress a revolutionary 
outbreak, and no certain news could be had of 
them. He had to return alone but not to drop 
the search; it was but the first of three great 
attempts he made, and the second was the most 
disastrous, when in a remote Province and a 
lonely district he met with a serious accident 
which kept him confined in some poor hovel for 
many months, his money all spent, and with no 
means of communicating with his people. He 
got back at last; and after recruiting his health 
and providing himself with funds, and obtain- 
ing fresh help from the War Office, he set out on 
his third venture; and at the end of three years 



A SECOND STORY OF TWO BROTHERS 43 

from the date of his first start, he succeeded in 
finding the object of his search, still serving as 
a common soldier in the army. That they were 
brothers there was no doubt in either of their 
minds, and together they travelled home. 

And now the old father and mother had got 
their son back, and they told him the story of 
the thirty years during which they had lamented 
his loss, and of how at last they had succeeded 
in recovering him: — what had he to tell them 
in return? It was a disappointing story. For, 
to begin with, he had no recollection of his child 
life at home — no faintest memory of mother or 
father or of the day when the sudden violent 
change came and he was forcibly taken away. 
His earliest recollection was of being taken 
about by someone — a man who owned him, who 
was always at the cattle-estates where he 
worked, and how this man treated him kindly 
until he was big enough to be set to work 
shepherding sheep and driving cattle, and doing 
anything a boy could do at any place they lived 
in, and that his owner and master then began to 
be exacting and tyrannical, and treated him so 
badly that he eventually ran away and never 



44 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

saw the man again. And from that time onward 
he lived much the same kind of life as when 
with his master, constantly going about from 
place to place, from province to province, and 
finally he had for some unexplained reason been 
taken into the army. 

That was all — the story of his thirty years of 
wild horseback life told in a few dry sentences! 
Could more have been expected! The mother 
had expected more and would not cease to ex- 
pect it. He was her lost one found again, the 
child of her body who in his long absence had 
gotten a second nature; but it was nothing but 
a colour, a garment, which would wear thinner 
and thinner, and by-and-by reveal the old 
deeper ineradicable nature beneath. So she 
imagined, and would take him out to walk to 
be with him, to have him all to herself, to caress 
him, and they would walk, she with an arm 
round his neck or waist; and when she released 
him or whenever he could make his escape from 
the house, he would go off to the quarters of 
the hired cattlemen and converse with them. 
They were his people, and he was one of them 
in soul in spite of his blue eyes, and like one of 



A SECOND STORY OF TWO BROTHERS 45 

them he could lasso or break a horse and throw 
a bull and put a brand on him, and kill a cow 
and skin it, or roast it in its hide if it was wanted 
so; and he could do a hundred other things, 
though he couldn't read a book, and I daresay 
he found it a very misery to sit on a chair in the 
company of those who read in books and spoke 
a language that was strange to him — the tongue 
he had himself spoken as a child! 



VII 

A THIRD STORY OF TWO 
BROTHERS 

STORIES of two brothers are common 
enough the world over — probably more so 
than stories of young men who have fallen in 
love with their grandmothers, and the main fea- 
ture in most of them, as in the story I have just 
told, is in the close resemblance of the two 
brothers, for on that everything hinges. It is 
precisely the same in the one I am about to re- 
late, one I came upon a few years ago — just how 
many I wish not to say, nor just where it hap- 
pened except that it was in the west country; 
and for the real names of people and places I 
have substituted fictitious ones. For this too, 
like the last, is a true story. The reader on fin- 
ishing it will perhaps blush to think it true, but 
apart from the moral aspect of the case it is, 
psychologically, a singularly interesting one. 

46 



A THIRD STORY OF TWO BROTHERS 47 

One summer day I travelled by a public con- 
veyance to PoUhampton, a small rustic market 
town several miles distant from the nearest rail- 
road. My destination was not the town itself, 
but a lonely heath-grown hill five miles further 
on, where I wished to find something that grew 
and blossomed on it, and my first object on ar- 
rival was to secure a riding horse or horse and 
trap to carry me there. I was told at once that 
it was useless to look for such a thing, as it was 
market day and everybody was fully occupied. 
That it was market day I already knew very 
well, as the two or three main streets and wide 
market-place in the middle of the town were 
full of sheep and cows and pigs and people run- 
ning about and much noise of shoutings and 
barking dogs. However, the strange object of 
the strange-looking stranger in coming to the 
town, interested some of the wild native boys, 
and they rushed about to tell it, and in less than 
five minutes a nice neat-looking middle-aged 
man stood at my elbow and said he had a good 
horse and trap and for seven-and-sixpence 
would drive me to the hill, help me there to 
find what I wanted, and bring me back in time 



48 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

to catch the conveyance. Accordingly in a few 
minutes we were speeding out of the town drawn 
by a fast-trotting horse. Fast trotters appeared 
to be common in these parts, and as we went 
along the road from time to time a small cloud 
of dust would become visible far ahead of us, 
and in two or three minutes a farmer's trap 
would appear and rush past on its way to 
market, to vanish behind us in two or three min- 
utes more and be succeeded by another and then 
others. By-and-by one came past driven by two 
young women, one holding the reins, the other 
playing with the whip. They were tall, dark, 
with black hair, and colourless faces, aged about 
thirty, I imagined. As they flew by I re- 
marked, *'I would lay a sovereign to a shilling 
that they are twins." "You'd lose your money — 
there's two or three years between them," said 
my driver. "Do you know them — you didn't 
nod to them nor they to you?" I said. "I know 
them," he returned, "as well as I know my own 
face when I look at myself in a glass." On 
which I remarked that it was very wonderful. 
" 'Tis only a part of the wonder, and not the 
biggest part," he said. "You've seen what they 



A THIRD STORY OF TWO BROTHERS 49 

are like and how like they are, but if you passed 
a day with them in the house you'd be able to 
tell one from the other; but if you lived a year 
in the same house with their two brothers you'd 
never be able to tell one from the other and be 
sure you were right. The strangest thing is that 
the brothers who, like their sisters, have two or 
three years between them, are not a bit like 
their sisters; they are blue-eyed and seem a dif- 
ferent race." 

That, I said, made it more wonderful still. A 
curiously symmetrical family. Rather awk- 
ward for their neighbours, and people who had 
business relations with them. 

''Yes — perhaps," he said, "but it served them 
very well on one occasion to be so much 
alike." 

I began to smell a dramatic rat and begged 
him to tell me all about it. 

He said he didn't mind telling me. Their 
name was Prage — Antony and Martin Prage, 
of Red Pit Farm, which they inherited from 
their father and worked together. They were 
very united. One day one of them, when riding 
about six miles from home, met a girl coming 



50 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

along the road, and stopped his horse to talk to 
her. She was a poor girl that worked at a dairy 
farm near by, and lived with her mother, a poor 
old widow-woman, in a cottage in the village. 
She was pretty, and the young man took a liking 
to her and he persuaded her to come again to 
meet him on another day at that spot; and there 
were many more meetings, and they were fond 
of each other; but after she told him that some- 
thing had happened to her he never came again. 
When she made enquiries she found he had 
given her a false name and address, and so she 
lost sight of him. Then her child was born, 
and she lived with her mother. And you must 
know what her life was — she and her old mother 
and her baby and nothing to keep them. And 
though she was a shy ignorant girl she made up 
her mind to look for him until she found him 
to make him pay for the child. She said he had 
come on his horse so often to see her that he 
could not be too far away, and every morning 
she would go off in search of him, and she spent 
weeks and months tramping about the country, 
visiting all the villages for many miles round 
looking for him. And one day in a small vil- 



A THIRD STORY OF TWO BROTHERS 51 

lage six miles from her home she caught sight 
of him galloping by on his horse, and seeing a 
woman standing outside a cottage she ran to her 
and asked who that young man was who had 
just ridden by. The woman told her she 
thought it was Mr. Antony Prage of Red Pit 
Farm, about two miles from the village. Then 
the girl came home and was advised what to 
do. She had to do it all herself as there was no 
money to buy a lawyer, so she had him brought 
to court and told her own story, and the judge 
was very gentle with her and drew out all the 
particulars. But Mr. Prage had got a lawyer, 
and when the girl had finished her story he got 
up and put just one question to her. First he 
called on Antony Prage to stand up in court, 
then he said to her, ''Do you swear that the 
man standing before you is the father of your 
child? 

And just when he put that question Antony's 
brother Martin, who had been sitting at the 
back of the court, got up, and coming forward 
stood at his brother's side. The girl stared at 
the two, standing together, too astonished to 
speak for some time. She looked from one to 



52 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

the other and at last said, ''I swear it is one of 
them." That, the lawyer said, wasn't good 
enough. If she could not swear that Antony 
Prage, the man she had brought into court, was 
the guilty person, then the case fell to the 
ground. 

My informant finished his story and I asked 
'Was that then the end — ^was nothing more 
done about it?" 

"No, nothing." 

"Did not the judge say it was a mean dirty 
trick arranged between the brothers and the 
lawyer?" 

"No, he didn't — he non-suited her and that 
was all." 

"And did not Antony Prage, or both of 
them, go into the witness box and swear that 
they were innocent of the charge?" 

"No, they never opened their mouths in 
court. When the judge told the young woman 
that she had failed to establish her case, they 
walked out smiling, and their friends came 
round them and they went off together." 

"And these brothers, I suppose, still live 
among you at their farm and are regarded as 



A THIRD STORY OF TWO BROTHERS 53 

good respectable young men, and go to chapel 
on Sundays, and by-and-by will probably marry 
nice respectable Methodist girls, and the girls' 
friends will congratulate them on making such 
good matches." 

"Oh, no doubt; one has been married some 
time and his wife has got a baby; the other one 
will be married before long." 

"And what do you think about it all?" 

"I've told you what happened because the 
facts came out in court and are known to every- 
one. What I think about it is what I think, and 
I've no call to tell that." 

"Oh, very w^ell!" I said, vexed at his non- 
committal attitude. Then I looked at him, but 
his face revealed nothing; he was just the man 
with a quiet manner and low voice who had 
put himself at my service and engaged to drive 
me five miles out to a hill, help me to find what 
I wanted and bring me back in time to catch the 
conveyance to my town, all for the surprisingly 
moderate sum of seven-and-sixpence. But he 
had told me the story of the two brothers; and 
besides, in spite of our faces being masks, if one 
make them so, mind converses with mind in 



54 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

some way the psychologists have not yet found 
out, and I knew that in his heart of hearts he 
regarded those two respectable members of the 
PoUhampton community much as I did. 



VIII 

THE TWO WHITE HOUSES: A 
MEMORY 

THERE'S no connection — not the slightest 
— between this two and the other twos; it 
was nevertheless the telling of the stories of the 
brothers which brought back to me this ancient 
memory of two houses. Nor were the two 
houses connected in any way, except that they 
were both white, situated on the same road, on 
the same side of it; also both stood a little way 
back from the road in grounds beautifully 
shaded with old trees. It was the great south- 
ern road which leads from the city of Buenos 
Ayres, the Argentine capital, to the vast level 
cattle-country of the pampas, where I was born 
and bred. Naturally it was a tremendously ex- 
citing adventure to a child's mind to come from 
these immense open plains, where one lived in 
rude surroundings with the semi-barbarous 
gauchos for only neighbours, to a great civilised 

55 



56 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

town full of people and of things strange and 
beautiful to see. And to touch and taste. 

Thus it happened that when I, a child, with 
my brothers and sisters, were taken to visit the 
town we would become more and more excited 
as we approached it at the end of a long journey, 
which usually took us two days, at all we saw 
— ox-carts and carriages and men on horseback 
on the wide hot dusty road, and the houses and 
groves and gardens on either side. ... It was 
thus that we became acquainted with the two 
white houses, and were attracted to them be- 
cause in their whiteness and green shade they 
looked beautiful to us and cool and restful, and 
we wished we could live in them. 

They were well outside of the town, the 
nearest being about two miles from its old south 
wall and fortifications, the other one a little over 
two miles further out. The last being the farth- 
est out was the first one we came to on our jour- 
neys to the city; it was a somewhat singular- 
looking building with a verandah supported by 
pillars painted green, and it had a high turret. 
And near it was a large dovecot with a cloud 
of pigeons usually flying about it, and we came 



TWO WHITE HOUSES: A MEMORY 57 

to calling it Dovecot House. The second house 
was plainer in form but was not without a pe- 
culiar distinction in its large wrought-iron front 
gate with white pillars on each side, and in front 
of each pillar a large cannon planted postwise 
in the earth. 

This we called Cannon House, but who lived 
in these two houses none could tell us. 

When I was old enough to ride as well as 
any grown-up, and my occasional visits to town 
were made on horseback, I once had three young 
men for my companions, the oldest about 
twenty-eight, the two not more than nineteen 
and twenty-one respectively. I was eagerly 
looking out for the first white house, and when 
we were coming to it I cried out, "Now we are 
coming to Dovecot House, let's go slow and 
look at it." 

Without a word they all pulled up, and for 
some minutes we sat silently gazing at the 
house. Then the eldest of the three said that 
if he was a rich man he would buy the house 
and pass the rest of his life very happily in it 
and in the shade of its old trees. 

In what, the others asked, would his happi- 



58 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

ness consist, since a rational being must have 
something besides a mere shelter from the 
storm and a tree to shade him from the sun to 
be happy? 

He answered that after securing the house 
he would range the whole country in search of 
the most beautiful woman in it, and that when 
he had found and made her his wife he would 
spend his days and years in adoring her for her 
beauty and charm. 

His two young companions laughed scorn- 
fully. Then one of them — the younger — said 
that he too if wealthy would buy the house, as 
he had not seen another so well suited for the 
life he would like to live. A life spent with 
books! He would send to Europe for all the 
books he desired to read and would fill the 
house with them; and he would spend his days 
in the house or in the shade of the trees, reading 
every day from morning to night undisturbed 
by traffic and politics and revolutions in the 
land, and by happenings all the world over. 

He too was well laughed at; then the last 
of the three said he didn't care for either of 
their ideals. He liked wine best, and if he had 



TWO WHITE HOUSES: A MEMORY 59 

great wealth he would buy the house and send to 
Europe — O not for books nor for a beautiful 
wife! but for wine — ^wines of all the choicest 
kinds in bottle and casks — and fill the cellars 
with it. And his choice wines would bring 
choice spirits to help him drink them; and then 
in the shade of the old trees they would have 
their table and sit over their wine — the merri- 
est, wittiest, wisest, most eloquent gathering in 
all the land. 

The others in their turn laughed at him, de- 
spising his ideal, and then we set off once more. 

They had not thought to put the question to 
me, because I was only a boy while they were 
grown men; but I had listened with such intense 
interest to that colloquy that when I recall the 
scene now I can see the very expressions of their 
sun-burnt faces and listen to the very sound of 
their speech and laughter. For they were all 
intimately known to me and I knew they were 
telling openly just what their several notions of 
a happy life were, caring nothing for the laugh- 
ter of the others. I was mightily pleased that 
they, too, had felt the attractions of my Dovecot 
House as a place where a man, whatsoever his 



6o A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

individual taste, might find a happy abiding- 
place. 

Time rolled on, as the slow-going old story- 
books written before we were born used to say, 
and I still preserved the old habit of pulling up 
my horse on coming abreast of each one of the 
two houses on every journey to and from town. 
Then one afternoon when walking my horse 
past the Cannon House I saw an old man 
dressed in black with snow-white hair and side- 
whiskers in the old, old style, and an ashen grey 
face, standing motionless by the side of one of 
the guns and gazing out at the distance. His 
eyes were blue — the dim weary blue of a tired 
^old man's eyes, and he appeared not to see me 
as I walked slowly by him within a few yards, 
but to be gazing at something beyond, very far 
away. I took him to be a resident, perhaps the 
owner of the house, and this was the first time 
I had seen any person there. So strongly did 
the sight of that old man impress me that I 
could not get his image out of my mind, and I 
spoke to those I knew in the city, and before 
long I met with one who was able to satisfy my 
curiosity about him. The old man I had seen, 



TWO WHITE HOUSES: A MEMORY 6i 

he told me, was Admiral Brown, an English- 
man who many years before had taken service 
with the Dictator Rosas at the time when Rosas 
was at war with the neighbouring Republic of 
Uruguay, and had laid siege to the city of 
Montevideo. Garibaldi, who was spending the 
years of his exile from Italy in South America, 
fighting as usual wherever there was any fight- 
ing to be had, flew to the help of Uruguay, and 
having acquired great fame as a sea-fighter was 
placed in command of the naval forces, such as 
they were, of the little Republic. But Brown 
was a better fighter, and he soon captured an-d 
destroyed his enemies' ships, Garibaldi himself 
escaping shortly afterwards to come back to the 
old world to renew the old fight against Austria. 

When old Admiral Brown retired he built 
this house, or had it given to him by Rosas who, 
I was told, had a great affection for him, and 
he then had the two cannons he had taken from 
one of the captured ships planted at his front 
gate. 

Shortly after that one glimpse I had had of 
the old Admiral, he died. And I think that 
when I saw him standing at his gate gazing past 



62 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

me at the distance, he was looking out for an 
expected messenger — a figure in black moving 
swiftly towards him with a drawn sword in his 
hand. 

Oddly enough it was but a short time after 
seeing the old man at his gate that I had my first 
sight of an inmate of Dovecot House. While 
slowly riding by it I saw a lady come out from 
the front door — young, good-looking, very pale 
and dressed in the deepest mourning. She had 
a bowl in her hand, and going a little distance 
from the house she called the pigeons and down 
they flew in a crowd to her feet to be fed. 

A few months later when passing I saw this 
same lady once more, and on this occasion she 
was coming to the gate as I rode by, and I saw 
her closely, for she turned and looked at me, 
not unseeingly like the old man, and her face 
was perfectly colourless and her large dark eyes 
the most sorrowful I had ever seen. 

That was my last sight of her, nor did I sec 
any human creature about the house after that 
for about two years. Then one hot summer day 
I caught sight of three persons who looked like 
servants or caretakers, sitting in the shade some 



TWO WHITE HOUSES: A MEMORY 63 

distance from the house and drinking mate, the 
tea of the country. 

Here, thought I, is an opportunity not to be 
lost — one long waited for! Leaving my horse 
at the gate I went to them, and addressing a 
large woman, the most important-looking per- 
son of the three, as politely as I could, I said I 
was not, as they perhaps imagined, a long absent 
friend or relation returned from the wars, but a 
perfect stranger, a traveller on the great south 
road; that I was hot and thirsty, and the sight 
of them refreshing themselves in that pleasant 
shade had tempted me to intrude myself upon 
them. 

She received me with smiles and a torrent of 
welcoming words, and the expectetd invitation 
to sit down and drink mate with them. She 
was a very large woman, very fat and very dark, 
of that reddish or mahogany colour which, 
taken with the black eyes and coarse black hair, 
is commonly seen in persons of mixed blood — • 
Iberian with aboriginal. I took her age to be 
about fifty years. And she was as voluble as she 
was fat and dark, and poured out such a stream 
of talk on or rather over me like warm greasy 



64 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

water, and so forcing me to keep my eyes on her, 
that it was almost impossible to give any atten- 
tion to the other two. One was her husband, 
Spanish and dark too, but with a different sort 
of darkness; a skeleton of a man with a bony 
ghastly face, in old frayed workman's clothes 
and dust-covered boots; his hands very grimy. 
And the third person was their daughter, as 
they called her, a girl of fifteen with a clear 
white and pink skin, regular features, beautiful 
grey eyes and light brown hair. A perfect type 
of a nice looking English girl such as one finds 
in any village, in almost any cottage, in the 
Midlands or anywhere else in this island. 

These two were silent, but at length, in one 
of the fat woman's brief pauses, the girl spoke, 
in a Spanish in which one could detect no trace 
of a foreign accent, in a low and pleasing voice, 
only to say something about the garden. She 
was strangely earnest and appeared anxious to 
impress on them that it was necessary to have 
certain beds of vegetables they cultivated 
watered that very day lest they should be lost 
owing to the heat and dryness. The man 
grunted and the woman said yes, yes, yes, a 



TWO WHITE HOUSES: A MEMORY 65 

dozen times. Then the girl left us, going back 
to her garden, and the fat woman went on talk- 
ing to me. I tried once or twice to get her to 
tell me about her daughter, as she called her, 
but she would not respond — she would at once 
go off into other subjects. Then I tried some- 
thing else and told her of my sight of a hand- 
some youug lady in mourning I had once seen 
there feeding the pigeons. And now she re- 
sponded readily enough and told me the whole 
story of the lady. 

She belonged to a good and very wealthy 
family of the city and was an only child, and 
lost both parents when very young. She was a 
very pretty girl of a joyous nature and a great fa- 
vourite in society. At the age of sixteen she be- 
came engaged to a young man who was also of 
a good and wealthy family. After becoming 
engaged to her he went to the war in Paraguay, 
and after an absence of two years, during which 
he had distinguished himself in the field and 
won his captaincy, he returned to marry her. 
She was at her own house waiting in joyful ex- 
citement to receive him when his carriage 
arrived, and she flew to the door to welcome 



66 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

him. He, seeing her, jumped out and came 
running to her with his arms out to embrace her, 
but when still three or four yards distant sud- 
denly stopped short and throwing up his arms 
fell to the earth a dead man. The shock of his 
death at this moment of supreme bliss for both 
of them was more than she could bear; it 
brought on a fever of the brain and it was 
feared that if she ever recovered it would be 
with a shattered mind. But it was not so: she 
got well and her reason was not lost, but she was 
changed into a different being from the happy 
girl of other days — fond of society, of dress, of 
pleasures; full of life and laughter. "Now she 
is sadness itself and will continue to wear 
mourning for the rest of her life, and prefers 
always to be alone. This old house, built by her 
grandfather when there were few houses in this 
suburb, she once liked to visit, but since her loss 
she has been but once in it. That was when you 
saw her, when she came to spend a few months 
in solitude. She would not even allow me to 
come and sit and talk to her! Think of that! 
She thinks nothing of her possessions and allows 
us to live here rent free, to grow vegetables and 



TWO WHITE HOUSES: A MEMORY 67 

raise poultry for the market. That is what we 
do for a living; my husband and our little 
daughter attend to these things out of doors, and 
I look after the house." 

When she got to the end of this long relation 
I rose and thanked her for her hospitality and 
made my escape. But the mystery of the white, 
gentle-voiced, grey-eyed girl haunted me, and 
from that time I made it my custom to call at 
Dovecot House on every journey to town, al- 
ways to be received with open arms, so to speak, 
by the great fat woman. But she always baffled 
me. The girl was usually to be seen, always the 
same, quiet, unsmiling, silent, or else speaking 
in Spanish in that gentle un-Spanish voice of 
some practical matter about the garden, the 
poultry, and so on. I was not in love with her, 
but extremely curious to know who she really 
was and how she came to be a "daughter," or 
in the hands of these unlikely people. For it 
was really one of the strangest things I had ever 
come across up to that early period of my life. 
Since then I have met with even more curious 
things; but being then of an age when strange 
things have a great fascination I was bent on 



68 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

getting to the bottom of the mystery. However, 
it was in vain; doubtless the fat woman sus- 
pected my motives in calling on her and sipping 
mate and listening to her talk, for whenever I 
mentioned her daughter in a tentative way, hop- 
ing it would lead to talk on that subject, she 
quickly and skilfully changed it for some other 
subject. And at last seeing that I was wasting 
my time, I dropped calling, but to this day I am 
rather sorry I allowed myself to be defeated. 

And now once more I must return for .he 
space of two or three pages to the brother white 
house before saying good-bye to both. 

For it had come to pass that while my investi- 
gations into the mystery of Dovecot House were 
in progress I had by chance got my foot in Can- 
non House. And this is how it happened. 
When the old Admiral whose ghostly image 
haunted me had received his message and van- 
ished from this scene, the house was sold and 
was bought by an Englishman, an old resident 
in the town, who for thirty years had been toil- 
ing and moiling in a business of some kind until 
he had built a small fortune. It then occurred 
to him, or more likely his wife and daughters 



TWO WHITE HOUSES: A MEMORY 69 

suggested it, that it was time to get a little way 
out of the hurly-burly, and they accordingly 
came to live at the house. There were two 
daughters, tall, slim, graceful girls, one, the 
elder, dark and pale like her old Cornish father, 
with black hair; the other a blonde with a rose 
colour and of a lively merry disposition. These 
girls happened to be friends of my sisters, and 
so it fell out that I too became an occasional 
visitor to Cannon House. 

Then a strange thing happened, which made 
it a sad and anxious home to the inmates for 
many long months, running to nigh on two 
years. They were fond of riding, and one after- 
noon when there was no visitor or any person 
to accompany them, the youngest girl said she 
would have her ride and ordered her horse to 
be brought from the paddock and saddled. Her 
elder sister, who was of a somewhat timid dis- 
position, tried to dissuade her from riding out 
alone on the highway. She replied that she 
would just have one little gallop — a mile or so 
— and then come back. Her sister, still anxious, 
followed her out of the gate and said she would 
wait there for her return. 



70 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Half a mile or so from the gate the horse, a 
high-spirited animal, took fright at something 
and bolted with its rider. The sister waiting 
and looking out saw them coming, the horse at 
a furious pace, the rider clinging for dear life 
to the pummel of the saddle. It flashed on her 
mind that unless the horse could be stopped 
before he came crashing through the gate her 
sister would be killed, and running out to a dis- 
tance of thirty yards from the gate she jumped 
at the horse's head as it came rushing by and 
succeeded in grasping the reins, and holding 
fast to them she was dragged to within two or 
three yards of the gate, when the horse was 
brought to a standstill, whereupon her grasp re- 
laxed and she fell to the ground in a dead faint. 

She had done a marvellous thing — almost in- 
credible. I have had horses bolt with me and 
have seen horses bolt with others many times; 
and every person who has seen such a thing and 
who knows a horse — its power and the blind 
mad terror it is seized with on occasions — will 
agree with me that it is only at the risk of his 
life that even a strong and agile man can attempt 
to stop a bolting horse. 



TWO WHITE HOUSES: A MEMORY 71 

We all said that she had saved her sister's life 
and were lost in admiration of her deed, but 
presently it seemed that she would pay for it 
with her own life. She recovered from the 
faint, but from that day began a decline, until 
in about three months' time she appeared to me 
more like a ghost than a being of flesh and 
blood. She had not strength to cross the rooms 
— all her strength and life were dying out of 
her because of that one unnatural, almost super- 
natural, act. She passed the days lying on a 
couch, speaking, when obliged to speak, in a 
whisper, her eyes sunk, her face white even to 
the lips, seeming the whiter for the mass of loose 
raven-black hair in which it was set. There 
were few doctors, English and native, who were 
not first and last called into consultation over 
the case, and still no benefit, no return to life, 
but ever the slow drifting towards the end. 
And at the last consultation of all this happened. 
When it was over and the doctors were asked 
into a room where refreshments were placed 
for them, the father of the girl spoke aside to 
a young doctor, a stranger to him, and begged 
him to tell him truly if there was no hope. The 



72 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Other replied that he should not lose all hope if 
— then he paused, and when he spoke again it 
was to say, "I am, you see, a very young man, a 
beginner in the profession, with little experi- 
ence, and hardly know why I am called here to 
consult with these older and wiser men; and 
naturally my small voice received but little at- 
tention." 

By-and-by, when they had all gone except the 
family doctor, he informed the distracted pa- 
rents that it was impossible to save their daugh- 
ter's life. The father cried out that he would 
not lose all hope and would call in another man, 
whereupon old Dr. Wormwood seized his brass- 
headed cane and took himself off in a huff. The 
young stranger was then called in. The patient 
had been given arsenic with other drugs; he 
gave her arsenic only, increasing the doses enor- 
mously, until she was given as much in a day 
or two as would have killed a healthy person; 
with milk for only nourishment. As a result, 
in a week or so the decline was stayed, and in 
that condition, very near to dissolution, she con- 
tinued some weeks, and then slowly, imper- 
ceptibly, began to mend. But so slow was the 



TWO WHITE HOUSES: A MEMORY 73 

improvement that it went on for months before 
she was well. It was a complete recovery; she 
had got back all her old strength and joy in life, 
and went again for a ride every day with her 
sister. 

Not very long afterwards both sisters were 
married, and my visits to Cannon House ceased 
automatically. 

Now the two White Houses are but a mem- 
ory, revived for a brief period to vanish quickly 
again into oblivion, a something seen long ago 
and far away in another hemisphere; and they 
are like two white cliffs seen in passing from the 
ship at the beginning of its voyage — gazed at 
with a strange interest as I passed them, and as 
they receded from me, until they faded from 
sight in the distance. 



IX 
DANDY 

A STORY OF A DOG 

HE was of mixed breed, and was supposed 
to have a strain of Dandy Dinmont blood 
which gave him his name. A big ungainly ani- 
mal with a rough shaggy coat of blue-grey hair 
and white on his neck and clumsy paws. He 
looked like a Sussex sheep-dog with legs re- 
duced to half their proper length. He was, 
when I first knew him, getting old and increas- 
ingly deaf and dim of sight, otherwise in the 
best of health and spirits, or at all events very 
good-tempered. 

Until I knew Dandy I had always supposed 
that the story of Ludlam's dog was pure inven- 
tion, and I daresay that is the general opinion 
about it; but Dandy made me reconsider the 
subject, and eventually I came to believe that 
Ludlam's dog did exist once upon a time, 
centuries ago perhaps, and that if he had been 

74 



DANDY 75 

the laziest dog in the world Dandy was not far 
behind him in that respect. It is true he did 
not lean his head against a wall to bark; he ex- 
hibited his laziness in other ways. He barked 
often, though never at strangers; he welcomed 
every visitor, even the tax-collector, with tail- 
waggings and a smile. He spent a good deal of 
his time in the large kitchen, where he had a 
sofa to sleep on, and when the two cats of the 
house wanted an hour's rest they would coil 
themselves up on Dandy's broad shaggy side, 
preferring that bed to cushion or rug. They 
were like a warm blanket over him, and it was 
a sort of mutual benefit society. After an hour's 
sleep Dandy would go out for a short constitu- 
tional as far as the neighbouring thoroughfare, 
where he would blunder against people, wag 
his tail to everybody, and then come back. He 
had six or eight or more outings each day, and, 
owing to doors and gates being closed and to 
his lazy disposition, he had much trouble in get- 
ting out and in. First he would sit down in the 
hall and bark, bark, bark, until some one would 
come to open the door for him, whereupon he 
would slowly waddle down the garden path, 



76 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

and if he found the gate closed he would again 
sit down and start barking. And the bark, bark 
would go on until some one came to let him out. 
But if after he had barked about twenty or 
thirty times no one came, he would deliberately 
open the gate himself, which he could do per- 
fectly well, and let himself out. In twenty min- 
utes or so he would be back at the gate and 
barking for admission once more, and finally, if 
no one paid any attention, letting himself in. 

Dandy always had something to eat at meal- 
times, but he too liked a snack between meals 
once or twice a day. The dog-biscuits were kept 
in an open box on the lower dresser shelf, so 
that he could get one "whenever he felt so dis- 
poged," but he didn't like the trouble this ar- 
rangement gave him, so he would sit down and 
start barking, and as he had a bark which was 
both deep and loud, after it had been repeated 
a dozen times at intervals of five seconds, any 
person who happened to be in or near the 
kitchen was glad to give him his biscuit for the 
sake of peace and quietness. If no one gave it 
him, he would then take it out himself and eat it. 

Now it came to pass that during the last year 



DANDY 77 

of the war dog-biscuits, like many other articles 
of food for man and beast, grew scarce, and 
were finally not to be had at all. At all events, 
that was what happened in Dandy's town of 
Penzance. He missed his biscuits greatly and 
often reminded us of it by barking; then, lest 
we should think he was barking about some- 
thing else, he would go and snifif and paw at the 
empty box. He perhaps thought it was pure 
forgetfulness on the part of those of the house 
who went every morning to do the marketing 
and had fallen into the habit of returning with- 
out any dog-biscuits in the basket. One day 
during that last winter of scarcity and anxiety I 
went to the kitchen and found the floor strewn 
all over with the fragments of Dandy's biscuit- 
box. Dandy himself had done it; he had 
dragged the box from its place out into the 
middle of the floor, and then deliberately set 
himself to bite and tear it into small pieces and 
scatter them about. He was caught at it just as 
he was finishing the job, and the kindly person 
who surprised him in the act suggested that the 
reason of his breaking up the box in that way 
was that he got something of the biscuit flavour 



78 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

by biting the pieces. My own theory was that 
as the box was there to hold biscuits and now 
held none, he had come to regard it as useless — 
as having lost its function, so to speak — also that 
its presence there was an insult to his intelli- 
gence, a constant temptation to make a fool of 
himself by visiting it half a dozen times a day 
only to find it empty as usual. Better, then, to 
get rid of it altogether, and no doubt when he 
did it he put a little temper into the business! 

Dandy, from the time I first knew him, was 
strictly teetotal, but in former and distant days 
he had been rather fond of his glass. If a per- 
son held up a glass of beer before him, I was 
told, he wagged his tail in joyful anticipation, 
and a little beer was always given him at meal- 
time. Then he had an experience, which, after 
a little hesitation, I have thought it best to re- 
late, as it is perhaps the most curious incident 
in Dandy's somewhat uneventful life. 

One day Dandy, who after the manner of his 
kind, had attached himself to the person who 
was always willing to take him out for a stroll, 
followed his friend to a neighbouring public- 
house, where the said friend had to discuss some 



DANDY 79 

business matter with the landlord. They went 
into the taproom, and Dandy, finding that the 
business was going to be a rather long affair, 
settled himself down to have a nap. Now it 
chanced that a barrel of beer which had just 
been broached had a leaky tap, and the land- 
lord had set a basin on the floor to catch the 
waste. Dandy, waking from his nap and hear- 
ing the trickling sound, got up, and going to 
the basin quenched his thirst, after which he re- 
sumed his nap. By-and-by he woke again and 
had a second drink, and altogether he woke and 
had a drink five or six times; then, the business 
being concluded, they went out together, but no 
sooner were they in the fresh air than Dandy 
began to exhibit signs of inebriation. He 
swerved from side to side, colliding with the 
passers-by, and finally fell off the pavement into 
the swift stream of water which at that point 
runs in the gutter at one side of the street. Get- 
ting out of the water, he started again, trying to 
keep close to the wall to save himself from an- 
other ducking. People looked curiously at 
him, and by-and-by they began to ask what the 
matter was. "Is your dog going to have a fit — 



8o A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

or what is it?" they asked. Dandy's friend said 
he didn't know; something was the matter no 
doubt, and he would take him home as quickly 
as possible and see to it. 

When they finally got to the house Dandy 
staggered to his sofa, and succeeded in climbing 
on to it and, throwing himself on his cushion, 
went fast asleep, and slept on without a break 
until the following morning. Then he rose 
quite refreshed and appeared to have forgotten 
all about it; but that day when at dinner-time 
some one said "Dandy" and held up a glass of 
beer, instead of wagging his tail as usual he 
dropped it between his legs and turned away in 
evident disgust. And from that time onward 
he would never touch it with his tongue, and it 
was plain that when they tried to tempt him, 
setting beer before him and smilingly inviting 
him to drink, he knew they were mocking him, 
and before turning away he would emit a low 
growl and show his teeth. It was the one thing 
that put him out and would make him angry 
with his friends and life companions. 

I should not have related this incident if 
Dandy had been alive. But he is no longer with 



DANDY 8i 

US. He was old — half-way between fifteen and 
sixteen: it seemed as though he had waited to 
see the end of the war, since no sooner was the 
armistice proclaimed than he began to decline 
rapidly. Gone deaf and blind, he still insisted 
on taking several constitutionals every day, and 
would bark as usual at the gate, and if no one 
came to let him out or admit him, he would 
open it for himself as before. This went on till 
January, 1919, when some of the boys he knew 
were coming back to Penzance and to the house. 
Then he established himself on his sofa, and 
we knew that his end was near, for there he 
would sleep all day and all night, declining 
food. It is customary in this country to chloro- 
form a dog and give him a dose of strychnine 
to "put him out of his misery." But it was not 
necessary in this case, as he was not in misery; 
not a groan did he ever emit, waking or sleep- 
ing; and if you put a hand on him he would 
look up and wag his tail just to let you know that 
it was well with him. And in his sleep he 
passed away — a perfect case of euthanasia — and 
was buried in the large garden near the second 
apple-tree. 



X 

THE SAMPHIRE GATHERER 

AT sunset, when the strong wind from the 
■L ^ sea was beginning to feel cold, I stood on 
the top of the sandhill looking down at an old 
woman hurrying about over the low damp 
ground beneath — a bit of sea-flat divided from 
the sea by the ridge of sand; and I wondered 
at her, because her figure was that of a feeble 
old woman, yet she moved — I had almost said 
flitted — over that damp level ground in a sur- 
prisingly swift light manner, pausing at inter- 
vals to stoop and gather something from the 
surface. But I couldn't see her distinctly 
enough to satisfy myself: the sun was sinking 
below the horizon, and that dimness in the air 
and coldness in the wind at day's decline, w^hen 
the year too was declining, made all objects look 
dim. Going down to her I found that she was 
old, with thin grey hair on an uncovered head, 
a lean dark face with regular features and grey 

82 



THE SAMPHIRE GATHERER 83 

eyes that were not old and looked steadily at 
mine, affecting me with a sudden mysterious 
sadness. For they were unsmiling eyes and 
themselves expressed an unutterable sadness, as 
it appeared to me at the first swift glance; or 
perhaps not that, as it presently seemed, but a 
shadowy something which sadness had left in 
them, when all pleasure and all interest in life 
forsook her, with all affections, and she no 
longer cherished either memories or hopes. 
This may be nothing but conjecture or fancy, 
but if she had been a visitor from another world 
she could not have seemed more strange to me. 
I asked her what she was doing there so late 
in the day, and she answered in a quiet even 
voice vv^hich had a shadow in it too, that she was 
gathering samphire of that kind which grows 
on the flat saltings and has a dull green leek-like 
fleshy leaf. At this season, she informed me, it 
was fit for gathering to pickle and put by for 
use during the year. She carried a pail to put 
it in, and a table-knife in her hand to dig the 
plants up by the roots, and she also had an old 
sack in which she put every dry stick and chip 
of wood she came across. She added that she 



84 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

had gathered samphire at this same spot every 
August end for very many years. 

I prolonged the conversation, questioning her 
and listening with afifected interest to her me- 
chanical answers, while trying to fathom those 
unsmiling, unearthly eyes that looked so stead- 
ily at mine. 

And presently, as we talked, a babble of hu- 
man voices reached our ears, and half turning 
we saw the crowd, or rather procession, of 
golfers coming from the golf-house by the links 
where they had been drinking tea. Ladies and 
gentlemen players, forty or more of them, fol- 
lowing in a loose line, in couples and small 
groups, on their way to the Golfers' Hotel, a 
little further up the coast; a remarkably good- 
looking lot with well-fed happy faces, well- 
dressed and in a merry mood, all freely talking 
and laughing. Some were staying at the hotel, 
and for the others a score or so of motor-cars 
were standing before its gates to take them in- 
land to their homes, or to houses where they 
were staying. 

We suspended the conversation while they 
were passing us, within three yards of where 



THE SAMPHIRE GATHERER 85 

we Stood, and as they passed the story of the 
links where they had been amusing themselves 
since luncheon-time came into my mind. The 
land there was owned by an old, an ancient, 
family; they had occupied it, so it is said, since 
the Conquest; but the head of the house was 
now poor, having no house property in London, 
no coal mines in Wales, no income from any 
other source than the land, the twenty or thirty 
thousand acres let for farming. Even so he 
would not have been poor, strictly speaking, but 
for the sons, who preferred a life of pleasure in 
town, where they probably had private estab- 
lishments of their own. At all events they kept 
race-horses, and had their cars, and lived in the 
best clubs, and year by year the patient old 
father was called upon to discharge their debts 
of honour. It was a painful position for so es- 
timable a man to be placed in, and he was much 
pitied by his friends and neighbours, who re- 
garded him as a worthy representative of the 
best and oldest family in the county. But he 
was compelled to do what he could to make 
both ends meet, and one of the little things he 
did was to establish golf-links over a mile or so 



86 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

of sand-hills, lying between the ancient coast 
village and the sea, and to build and run a Golf- 
ers' Hotel in order to attract visitors from all 
parts. In this way, 'incidentally, the villagers 
were cut off from their old direct way to the sea 
and deprived of those barren dunes, which were 
their open space and recreation ground and had 
stood them in the place of a common for long 
centuries. They were warned off and told that 
they must use a path to the beach which took 
them over half a mile from the village. And 
they had been very humble and obedient and 
had made no complaint. Indeed, the agent had 
assured them that they had every reason to Fe 
grateful to the overlord, since in return for that 
trivial inconvenience they had been put to they 
would have the golfers there, and there would 
be employment for some of the village boys as 
caddies. Nevertheless, I had discovered that 
they were not grateful but considered that an 
injustice had been done to them, and it rankled 
in their hearts. 

I remembered all this while the golfers were 
streaming by, and wondered if this poor woman 
did not, like her fellow-villagers, cherish a 



THE SAMPHIRE GATHERER 87 

secret bitterness against those who had deprived 
them of the use of the dunes where for genera- 
tions they had been accustomed to walk or sit 
or lie on the loose yellow sands among the bar- 
ren grasses, and had also cut off their direct 
way to the sea where they went daily in search 
of bits of firewood and whatever else the waves 
threw up which would be a help to them in 
their poor lives. 

If it be so, I thought, some change will surely 
come into those unchanging eyes at the sight of 
all these merry, happy golfers on their way to 
their hotel and their cars and luxurious homes. 

But though I watched her face closely there 
was no change, no faintest trace of ill-feeling or 
feeling of any kind; only that same shadow 
which had been there was there still, and her 
fixed eyes were like those of a captive bird or 
animal, that gaze at us, yet seem not to see us 
but to look through and beyond us. And it was 
the same when they had all gone by and we fin- 
ished our talk and I put money in her hand; 
she thanked me without a smile, in the same 
quiet even tone of voice in which she had re- 
plied to my question about the samphire. 



88 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

I went up once more to the top of the ridge, 
and looking down saw her again as I had seen 
her at first, only dimmer, swiftly, lightly mov- 
ing or flitting moth-like or ghost-like over the 
low flat salting, still gathering samphire in the 
cold wind, and the thought that came to me w^as 
that I was looking at and had been interviewing 
a being that was very like a ghost, or in any case 
a soul, a something which could not be de- 
scribed, like certain atmospheric effects in earth 
and water and sky which are ignored by the 
landscape painter. To protect himself he cul- 
tivates what is called the "sloth of the eye" : he 
thrusts his fingers into his ears so to speak, not 
to hear that mocking voice that follows and 
mocks him with his miserable limitations. He 
who seeks to convey his impressions with a pen 
is almost as badly off: the most he can do in 
such instances as the one related, is to endeavour 
to convey the emotion evoked by what he has 
witnessed. 

Let me then take the case of the man who has 
trained his eyes, or rather whose vision has un- 
consciously trained itself, to look at every face 
he meets, to find in most cases something, how- 



THE SAMPHIRE GATHERER 89 

ever little, of the person's inner life. Such a 
man could hardly walk the length of the Strand 
and Fleet-street or of Oxford-street without 
being startled at the sight of a face which haunts 
him with its tragedy, its mystery, the strange 
things it has half revealed. But it does not 
haunt him long; another arresting face follows, 
and then another, and the impressions all fade 
and vanish from the memory in a little while. 
But from time to time, at long intervals, once 
perhaps in a lustrum, he will encounter a face 
that will not cease to haunt him, whose vivid 
impression will not fade for years. It was a 
face and eyes of that kind which I met in the 
samphire gatherer on that cold evening; but the 
mystery of it is a mystery still. 



XI 

A SURREY VILLAGE 

THROUGH the scattered village of Churt, 
in its deepest part, runs a clear stream, 
broad in places, where it spreads over the 
road-way and is so shallow that the big cart- 
horses are scarce wetted above their fetlocks in 
crossing; in other parts narrow enough for a 
man to jump over, yet deep enough for the trout 
to hide in. And which is the prettiest one finds 
it hard to say — the wide splashy places where 
the cattle come to drink, and the real cow and 
the illusory inverted cow beneath it are to be 
seen touching their lips; or where the oaks and 
ashes and elms stretch and mingle their hori- 
zontal branches; — where there is a green leafy 
canopy above and its green reflection below with 
the glassy current midway between. On one 
side the stream is Surrey, on the other Hamp- 
shire. Where the two counties meet there is a 
vast extent of heath-land — brown desolate 
moors and hills so dark as to look almost black. 



A SURREY VILLAGE 91 

It is wild, and its vvildness is of that kind which 
comes of a barren soil. It is a country best ap- 
preciated by those who, rich or poor, take life 
easily, who love all aspects of nature, all 
weathers, and above everything the liberty 
of wide horizons. To others the cry of ''Back 
to the land" would have a somewhat dreary and 
mocking sound in such a place, like that curious 
cry, half laughter and half wail, which the 
peewit utters as he anxiously winnows the air 
with creaking wings above the pedestrian's 
head. But it is not all of this character. From 
some black hill-top one looks upon a green ex- 
panse, fresh and lively by contrast as the young 
leaves of deciduous trees in spring, with black 
again or dark brown of pine and heath beyond. 
It is the oasis where Churt is. The vivifying 
spirit of the wind at that height, and that vision 
of verdure beneath, produce an exhilarating 
effect on the mind. It is common knowledge 
that the devil once lived in or haunted these 
parts: now my hill-top fancy tells me that once 
upon a time a better being, a wandering angel, 
flew over the country, and looking down and 
seeing it so dark-hued and desolate, a compas- 



92 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

sionate impulse took him, and unclasping his 
light mantle he threw it down, so that the hu- 
man inhabitants should not be without that 
sacred green colour that elsewhere beautifies the 
earth. There to this day it lies where it fell — 
a mantle of moist vivid green, powdered with 
silver and gold, embroidered with all floral 
hues; all reds from the faint blush on the petals 
of the briar-rose to the deep crimson of the red 
trifolium; and all yellows, and blues, and 
purples. 

It was pleasant to return from a ramble over 
the rough heather to the shade of the green vil- 
lage lanes, to stand aside in some deep narrow 
road to make room for a farmer's waggon to 
pass, drawn by five or six ponderous horses; 
to meet the cows too, smelling of milk and new- 
mown hay, attended by the small cow-boy. One 
notices in most rural districts how stunted in 
growth many of the boys of the labourers are; 
here I was particularly struck by it on account 
of the fine physique of many of the young men. 
It is possible that the growing time may be later 
and more rapid here than in most places. Some 
of the young men are exceptionally tall, and 



A SURREY VILLAGE 93 

there was a larger percentage of tall handsome 
women than I have seen in any village in Surrey 
and Hampshire. But the children were almost 
invariably too small for their years. The most 
stunted specimen was a little boy I met near 
Hindhead. He was thin, with a dry wizened 
face, and looked at the most about eight years 
old; he assured me that he was twelve. I en- 
gaged this gnome-like creature to carry some- 
thing for me, and we had three or four miles' 
ramble together. A curious couple we must 
have seemed — a giant and a pigmy, the pigmy 
looking considerably older than the giant. He 
was a heath-cutter's child, the eldest of seven 
children! They were very poor, but he could 
earn nothing himself, except by gathering 
whortleberries in their season; then he said, all 
seven of them turned out with their parents, the 
youngest in its mother's arms. I questioned 
him about the birds of the district; he stoutly 
maintained that he recognised only four, and 
proceeded to name them. 

"Here is another," said I, "a fifth you didn't 
name, singing in the bushes half a dozen yards 
from where we stand — the best singer of all." 



94 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

"I did name it," he returned, "that's a 
thrush." 

It was a nightingale, a bird he did not know. 
But he knew a thrush — it was one of the four 
birds he knew, and he stuck to it that it was a 
thrush singing. Afterwards he pointed out the 
squalid-looking cottage he lived in. It was on 
the estate of a great lady. 

"Tell me," I said, "is she much liked on the 
estate?" 

He pondered the question for a few moments, 
then replied, "Some likes her and some don't," 
and not a word more would he say on that sub- 
ject. A curious amalgam of stupidity and 
shrewdness; a bad observer of bird-life, but a 
cautious little person in answering leading ques- 
tions; he was evidently growing up (or not do- 
ing so) in the wrong place. 

Going out for a stroll in the evening, I came 
to a spot where two small cottages stood on one 
side of the road, and a large pond fringed with 
rushes and a coppice on the other. Just by the 
cottage five boys were amusing themselves by 
throwing stones at a mark, talking, laughing and 
shouting at their play. Not many yards from 



A SURREY VILLAGE 95 

the noisy boys some fowls were picking about 
on the turf close to the pond; presently out of 
the rushes came a moorhen and joined them. 
It was in fine feather, very glossy, the brightest 
nuptial yellow and scarlet on beak and shield. 
It moved about, heedless of my presence and of 
the noisy stone-throwing boys, with that pretty 
dignity and unconcern which make it one of the 
most attractive birds. What a contrast its ap- 
pearance and motions presented to those of the 
rough-hewn, ponderous fowls, among which it 
moved so daintily! I was about to say that he 
was "just like a modern gentleman" in the 
midst of a group of clodhoppers in rough old 
coats, hob-nailed boots, and wisps of straw 
round their corduroys, standing with clay pipes 
in their mouths, each with a pot of beer in his 
hand. Such a comparison would have been an 
insult to the moorhen. Nevertheless some am- 
bitious young gentleman of aesthetic tastes might 
do worse than get himself up in this bird's 
livery. An open coat of olive-brown silk, with 
an oblique white band at the side; waistcoat or 
cummerbund, and knickerbockers, slaty grey; 
stockings and shoes of olive green; and, for a 



96 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

touch of bright colour, an orange and scarlet 
tie. It would be pleasant to meet him in Picca- 
dilly. But he would never, never be able to get 
that quaint pretty carriage. The "Buzzard 
lope" and the crane's stately stride are imitable 
by man, but not the moorhen's gait. And what 
a mess of it our young gentleman would make 
in attempting at each step to throw up his coat 
tails in order to display conspicuously the white 
silk underlining! 

While I watched the pretty creature, musing 
sadly the while on the ugliness of men's gar- 
ments, a sudden storm of violent rasping 
screams burst from some holly bushes a few 
yards away. It proceeded from three excited 
jays, but whether they w^ere girding at me, the 
shouting boys, or a skulking cat among the 
bushes, I could not make out. 

When I finally left this curious company — 
noisy boys, great yellow feather-footed fowls, 
dainty moorhen and vociferous jays — it was 
late, but another amusing experience was in 
store for me. Leaving the village I went up 
the hill to the Devil's Jumps to see the sun set. 
The Devil, as I have said, was much about these 



A SURREY VILLAGE 97 

parts in former times; his habits were quite fa- 
miliar to the people, and his name became asso- 
ciated with some of the principal landmarks 
and features of the landscape. It was his cus- 
tom to go up into these rocks, where, after 
drawing his long tail over his shoulder to have 
it out of his way, he would take one of his great 
flying leaps or jumps. On the opposite side of 
the village we have the Poor Devil's Bottom — 
a deep treacherous hole that cuts like a ravine 
through the moor, into which the unfortunate 
fellow once fell and broke several of his bones. 
A little further away, on Hindhead, we have 
the Devil's Punch Bowl, that huge basin-shaped 
hollow on the hill which has now become almost 
as famous as Flamborough Head or the Valley 
of Rocks. 

At the Jumps a shower came on, and to escape 
a wetting I crept into a hole or hollow in the 
rude mass of black basaltic rock which stands 
like a fortress or ruined castle on the summit of 
the hill. When the shower was nearly over I 
heard the wing-beats and low guttural voice of 
a cuckoo; he did not see my crouching form in 
the hollow and settled on a projecting block of 



98 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Stone close to me — not three yards from my 
head. Presently he began to call, and it struck 
me as very curious that his voice did not sound 
louder or different in quality than when heard 
at a distance of forty or fifty yards. When he 
had finished calling and flown away I crept out 
of my hole and walked back over the wet heath, 
thinking now of the cuckoo and now of that 
half natural, half supernatural but not very sub- 
lime being who, as I have said, was formerly a 
haunter of these parts. This was a question that 
puzzled my mind. It is easy to say that legends 
of the Devil are common enough all over the 
land, and date back to old monkish times or to 
the beginning of Christianity, when the spiritual 
enemy was very much in man's thoughts; the 
curious thing is, that the devil associated in tra- 
dition with certain singular features in the 
landscape, as it is here in this Surrey village, 
and in a thousand other places, has little or no 
resemblance to the true and only Satan. He is 
at his greatest a sort of demi-god, or a semi- 
human being or monster of abnormal power 
and wildly eccentric habits, but not really bad. 
Thus, I was told by a native of Churt that when 



A SURREY VILLAGE 99 

the Devil met with that serious accident which 
gave its name to the Poor Devil's Bottom, his 
painful cries and groans attracted the villagers, 
and they ministered to him, giving him food 
and drink and applying such remedies as they 
knew of to his hurts until he recovered and got 
out of the hole. Whether or not this legend has 
ever been recorded I cannot say; one is struck 
with its curious resemblance to some of the 
giant legends of the west of England. Near 
Devizes there is a deep impression in the earth 
about which a very different story is told : it is 
called the Devil's Jumps and is, I believe, sup- 
posed to be an entrance to his subterranean 
dwelling-place. He jumps down through that 
hole, the earth opens to receive him, and closes 
behind him. And it is (or was) believed that 
if any person will run three times round the 
hole the Devil will issue from it and start off 
in chase of a hare! Why he comes forth and 
chases a hare nobody knows. 

It was only recently, when in Cornwall, the 
most legendary of the counties, that I found out 
who and what this rural village devil I had 
been thinking of really was. In Cornwall one 



loo A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

finds many legends of the Devil, as many in fact 
as in Flintshire, where the Devil has left so 
many memorials on the downs, but they are few 
to those relating to the giants. These legends 
were collected by Robert Hunt, and first pub- 
lished over half a century ago in his Popular 
Romances of the West of England, and he 
points out in this work that "devil" in most of 
the legends appears to be but another name for 
''giant," that in many cases the character of the 
being is practically the same. He believes that 
traditions of giants, which probably date back 
to prehistoric times, were once common all over 
the country, that they were always associated 
with certain impressive features in the land- 
scape — grotesque hills, chasms and hollows in 
the downs and huge masses of rock; that the 
early teachers of Christianity, anxious to kill 
these traditions, or to blot out a false belief or 
superstition with the darker and more terrible 
image of a powerful being at war with man, 
taught that "giant" was but another name for 
Devil. If this is so, the teaching was not alto- 
gether good policy. The giants, it is true, were 
an awesome folk and flung immense rocks about 



A SURREY VILLAGE loi 

in a reckless manner and did many other mad 
things; and there were some that were wholly 
bad, just as there are rogue elephants and as 
there are black sheep in the human flock, but 
they were not really bad as a rule, and certainly 
not too intelligent. Even little men with their 
cunning little brains could get the better of 
them. The result of such teaching could only 
be that the Devil would be regarded as not the 
unmitigated monster they had been told that 
he was, nor without human weaknesses and 
virtues. When we say now that he is not "as 
black as he is painted" we may be merely re- 
peating what was being said by the common 
people of England in the days of St. Augustine 
and St. Colomb, and of the Irish missionaries 
in Cornwall. 



XII 

A WILTSHIRE VILLAGE 

"TT7HAT is your nearest village?" I asked 

^ ' of a labourer I met on the road one 
bleak day in early spring, after a great frost: 
for I had walked far enough and was cold and 
tired, and it seemed to me that it would be well 
to find shelter for the night and a place to set- 
tle down in for a season. 

"Burbage," he answered, pointing the way 
to it. 

And when I came to it, and walked slowly 
and thoughtfully the entire length of its one 
long street or road, my sister said to me: 

"Yet another old ancient village!" and then, 
with a slight tremor in her voice, *^And you are 
going to stay in it!" 

"Yes," I replied, in a tone of studied indif- 
ference: but as to whether it was ancient or not 
I could not say; — I had never heard its name 
before, and knew nothing about it: doubtless it 
was characteristic 



A WILTSHIRE VILLAGE 103 

''That weary word," she murmured. 

— But it was neither strikingly picturesque, 
nor quaint, nor did I wish it were either one or 
the other, nor anything else attractive or re- 
markable, since I sought only for a quiet spot 
where my brain might think the thoughts and 
my hand do the work that occupied me. A vil- 
lage remote, rustic, commonplace, that would 
make no impression on my preoccupied mind 
and leave no lasting image, nor anything but 
a faint and fading memory. 

Th'_.s I pacified Psyche and kissed her, 
And tempted her out of her gloom — 
And conquered her scruples and gloom. 

And fortune favoured her, all things conspir- 
ing to keep me content to walk in that path 
which I had so readily, so lightly, promised to 
keep: for the work to be done was bread and 
cheese to me, and in a sense to her, and had to 
be done, and there was nothing to distract at- 
tention. 

It was quiet in my chosen cottage, in the low- 
ceilinged room where I usually sat: outside, the 
walls were covered with ivy which made it like 



I04 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

a lonely lodge in a wood; and when I opened 
my small outward-opening latticed window 
there was no sound except the sighing of the 
wind in the old yew tree growing beside and 
against the wall, and at intervals the chirruping 
of a pair of sparrows that flew up from time to 
time from the road with long straws in their 
bills.' They were building a nest beneath my 
window — possibly it was the first nest made that 
year in all this country. 

All the day long it was quiet; and when, tired 
of work, I went out and away from the village 
across the wide vacant fields, there was nothing 
to attract the eye. The deadly frost which had 
held us for long weeks in its grip had gone, for 
it was now drawing to the end of March, but 
winter was still in the air and in the earth. Day 
after day a dull cloud was over all the sky and 
the wind blew cold from the north-east. The 
aspect of the country, as far as one could see in 
that level plain, was wintry and colourless. The 
hedges in that part are kept cut and trimmed so 
closely that they seemed less like hedges than 
mere faint greyish fences of brushwood, divid- 
ing field from field: they would not have af- 



A WILTSHIRE VILLAGE 105 

forded shelter to a hedge-sparrow. The trees 
were few and far apart — grey naked oaks, un- 
visited even by the tits that find their food in 
bark and twig; the wide fields between were 
bare and devoid of life of man or beast or bird. 
Ploughed and grass lands were equally desolate; 
for the grass was last year's, long dead and now 
of that neutral, faded, and palest of all pale dead 
colours in nature. It is not white nor yellow, and 
there is no name for it. Looking down when I 
walked in the fields the young spring grass could 
be seen thrusting up its blades among the old 
and dead, but at a distance of a few yards these 
delicate living green threads were invisible. 

Coming back out of the bleak wind it always 
seemed strangely warm in the village street — it 
was like coming into a room in which a fire has 
been burning all day. So grateful did I find this 
warmth of the deep old sheltered road, so vocal 
too and full of life did it seem after the pallor 
and silence of the desolate world without, that 
I made it my favourite walk, measuring its 
length from end to end. Nor was it strange that 
at last, unconsciously, in spite of a preoccupied 
brain and of the assurance given that I would 



io6 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

reside in the village, like a snail in its shell, 
without seeing it, an impression began to form 
and an influence to be felt. 

Some vague speculations passed through my 
mind as to how old the village might be. I had 
heard some person remark that it had formerly 
been much more populous, that many of its 
people had from time to time drifted away to 
the towns; their old empty cottages pulled 
down and no new ones built. The road was 
deep and the cottages on either side stooR six to 
eight or nine feet above it. Where a cottage 
stood close to the edge of the road and faced it, 
the door was reached by a flight of stone or 
brick steps; at such cottages the landing above 
the steps was like a balcony, where one could 
stand and look down upon a passing cart, or the 
daily long straggling procession of children go- 
ing to or returning from the village school. I 
counted the steps that led up to my own front 
door and landing place and found there were 
ten: I took it that each step represented a cen- 
tury's wear of the road by hoof and wheel and 
human feet, and the conclusion was thus that 
the village was a thousand years old — probably 



A WILTSHIRE VILLAGE 107 

it was over two thousand. A few centuries more 
or less did not seem to matter much; the subject 
did not interest me in the least, my passing 
thought about it was an idle straw showing 
which way the mental wind was blowing. 

Albeit half-conscious of what that way was, I 
continued to assure Psyche — my sister — that all 
was going well: that if she would only keep 
quiet there would be no trouble, seeing that I 
knew my own weakness so well — a habit of 
dropping the thing I am doing because some- 
thing more interesting always crops up. Here 
fortunately for us (and our bread and cheese) 
there was nothing interesting — ab-so-lute-ly. 

But in the end, when the work was finished, 
the image that had been formed could no longer 
be thrust away and forgotten. It was there, an 
entity as well as an image — an intelligent mas- 
terful being who said to me not in words but 
very plainly: Try to ignore me and it will be 
worse for you: a secret want will continually 
disquiet you: recognize my existence and right 
to dwell in and possess your soul, as you dwell 
in mine, and there will be a pleasant union and 
peace between us. 



io8 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

To resist, to argue the matter like some mis- 
erable metaphysician would have been use- 
less. 

The persistent image wasof the old deep road, 
the green bank on each side, on which stood 
thatched cottages, whitewashed or of the pale 
red of old weathered bricks; each with its plot 
of ground or garden with, in some cases, a few 
fruit trees. Here and there stood a large shade 
tree — oak or pine or yew; then a vacant space, 
succeeded by a hedge, gapped and ragged and 
bare, or of evergreen holly or yew, smoothly 
trimmed; then a ploughed field, and again cot- 
tages, looking up or down the road, or placed 
obliquely, or facing it: and looking at one cot- 
tage and its surrounding, there would perhaps 
be a water-butt standing beside it; a spade and 
fork leaning against the wall; a white cat sitting 
in the shelter idly regarding three or four fowls 
moving about at a distance of a few yards, their 
red feathers ruffled by the wind; further away 
a wood-pile; behind it a pigsty sheltered by 
bushes, and on the ground, among the dead 
weeds, a chopping-block, some broken bricks, 
little heaps of rusty iron, and other litter. Each 



A WILTSHIRE VILLAGE 109 

plot had its own litter and objects and ani- 
mals. 

On the steeply sloping sides of the road the 
young grass was springing up everywhere 
among the old rubbish of dead grass and leaves 
and sticks and stems. More conspicuous than 
the grass blades, green as verdigris, were the 
arrow-shaped leaves of the arum or cuckoo-pint. 
But there were no flowers yet except the wild 
strawberry, and these so few and small that only 
the eager eyes of the little children, seeking for 
spring, might find them. 

Nor was the village less attractive in its 
sounds than in the natural pleasing disorder of 
its aspect and the sheltering warmth of its street. 
In the fields and by the skimpy hedges perfect 
silence reigned; only the wind blowing in your 
face filled your ears with a rushing aerial sound 
like that which lives in a seashell. Coming back 
from this open bleak silent world, the village 
street seemed vocal with bird voices. For the 
birds, too, loved the shelter which had enabled 
them to live through that great frost; and they 
were now recovering their voices; and whenever 
the wind lulled and a gleam of sunshine fell 



no A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

from the grey sky, they were singing from end 
to end of the long street. 

Listening to, and in some instances seeing the 
singers and counting them, I found that there 
were two thrushes, four blackbirds, several 
chaffinches and green finches, one pair of gold- 
finches, half-a- dozen linnets and three or four 
yellow-hammers; a sprinkling of hedge-spar- 
rows, robins and wrens all along the street; and 
finally, one skylark from a field close by would 
rise and sing at a considerable height directly 
above the road. Gazing up at the lark and put- 
ting myself in his place, the village beneath 
with its one long street appeared as a vari-col- 
oured band lying across the pale earth. There 
were dark and bright spots, lines and streaks, 
of yew and holly, red or white cottage walls and 
pale yellow thatch; and the plots and gardens 
were like large reticulated mottlings. Each had 
its centre of human life with life of bird and 
beast, and the centres were in touch with one 
another, connected like a row of children linked 
together by their hands; all together forming 
one organism, instinct with one life, moved by 



A WILTSHIRE VILLAGE iii 

one mind, like a many-coloured serpent lying at 
rest, extended at full length upon the ground. 

I imagined the case of a cottager at one end 
of the village occupied in chopping up a tough 
piece of wood or stump and accidentally letting 
fall his heavy sharp axe on to his foot, inflicting 
a grievous wound. The tidings of the accident 
would fly from mouth to mouth to the other ex- 
tremity of the village, a mile distant; not only 
would every individual quickly know of it, but 
have at the same time a vivid mental image of 
his fellow villager at the moment of his misad- 
venture, the sharp glittering axe falling on to 
his foot, the red blood flowing from the wound; 
and he would at the same time feel the wound 
in his own foot, and the shock to his system. 

In like manner all thoughts and feelings 
would pass freely from one to another, although 
not necessarily communicated by speech; and 
all would be participants in virtue of that sym- 
pathy and solidarity uniting the members of a 
small isolated community. No one would be 
capable of a thought or emotion which would 
seem strange to the others. 



112 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

The temper, the mood, the outlook, of the in- 
dividual and the village would be the same. 

I remember that something once occurred in 
a village where I was staying, which was in a 
way important to the villagers, although it gave 
them nothing and took nothing from them: it 
excited them without being a question of poli- 
tics, or of "morality," to use the word in its nar- 
row popular sense. I spoke first to a woman 
of the village about it, and was not a little sur- 
prised at the view she took of the matter, for to 
me this seemed unreasonable; but I soon found 
that all the villagers took this same unreasonable 
view, their indignation, pity and other emotions 
excited being all expended as it seemed to me in 
the wrong direction. The woman had, in fact, 
merely spoken the mind of the village. 

Owing to this close intimacy and family char- 
acter of the village which continues from gen- 
eration to generation, there must be under all 
differences on the surface a close mental likeness 
hardly to be realised by those who live in popu- 
lous centres; a union between mind and mind 
corresponding to that reticulation as it appeared 
to me, of plot with plot and with all they con- 



A WILTSHIRE VILLAGE 113 

tained. It is perhaps equally hard to realise that 
this one mind of a particular village is individ- 
ual, v^hoUy its ov^n, unlike that of any other vil- 
lage, near or far. For one village differs from 
another; and the village is in a sense a body, and 
this body and the mind that inhabits it, act and! 
react on one another, and there is between them 
a correspondence and harmony, although it may 
be but a rude harmony. 

It is probable that we that are country born 
and bred are affected in more ways and more 
profoundly than we know by our surroundings. 
The nature of the soil we live on, the absence 
or presence of running water, of hills, rocks, 
woods, open spaces; every feature in the land- 
scape, the vegetative and animal life — every- 
thing in fact that we see, hear, smell and feel, 
enters not into the body only, but the soul, and 
helps to shape and colour it. Equally important 
in its action on us are the conditions created by 
man himself: — situation, size, form and the ar- 
rangements of the houses in the village; its tra- 
ditions, customs and social life. 

On that airy mirador which I occupied under 
(not in) the clouds, after surveying the village 



114 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

beneath me I turned my sight abroad and saw, 
near and far, many many other villages; and 
there was no other exactly like Burbage nor any 
two really alike. 

Each had its individual character. To men- 
tion only two that were nearest — East Grafton 
and Easton, or Easton Royal. The first, small 
ancient rustic-looking place: a large green, 
park-like shaded by well-grown oak, elm, 
beech, and ash trees; a small slow stream of 
water winding through it: round this pleasant 
shaded and watered space the low-roofed 
thatched cottages, each cottage in its own gar- 
den, its porch and walls overgrown with ivy and 
creepers. Thus, instead of a straight line like 
Burbage it formed a circle, and every cottage 
opened on to the tree-shaded village green; and 
this green was like a great common room where 
the villagers meet, where the children play, 
where lovers whisper their secrets, where the 
aged and weary take their rest, and all subjects 
of interest are daily discussed. If a blackcap 
or chaffinch sung in one of the trees the strain 
could be heard in every cottage in the circle. 



A WILTSHIRE VILLAGE 115 

All hear and see the same things, and think and 
feel the same. 

The neighbouring village was neither line, 
nor circle, but a cluster of cottages. Or rather 
a group of clusters, so placed that a dozen or 
more housewives could stand at their respective 
doors, very nearly facing one another, and con- 
fabulate without greatly raising their voices. 
Outside, all round, the wide open country — 
grass and tilled land and hedges and hedgerow 
elms — is spread out before them. And in sight 
of all the cottages, rising a little above them, 
stands the hoary ancient church with giant old 
elm-trees growing near it, their branches laden 
with rooks' nests, the air full of the continuous 
noise of the wrangling birds, as they fly round 
and round, and go and come bringing sticks all 
day, one to add to the high airy city, the other to 
drop as an offering to the earth-god beneath, in 
whose deep-buried breast the old trees have 
their roots. 

But the other villages that cannot be named 
were in scores and hundreds, scattered all over 
Wiltshire, for the entire county was visible from 



ii6 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

that altitude, and not Wiltshire only but Somer- 
set, and Berkshire and Hampshire, and all the 
adjoining counties, and finally, the prospect still 
widening, all England from rocky Land's End 
to the Cheviots and the wide windy moors 
sprinkled over with grey stone villages. Thou- 
sands and thousands of villages; but I could only 
see a few distinctly — not more than about two 
hundred, the others from their great distance — 
not in space but time — appearing but vaguely 
as spots of colour on the earth. Then, fixing 
my attention on those that were most clearly 
seen, I found myself in thought loitering in 
them, revisiting cottages and conversing with 
old people and children I knew; and recalling 
old and remembered scenes and talks, I smiled 
and by-and-by burst out laughing. 

It was then, when I laughed, that visions, 
dreams, memories, were put to flight, for my 
wise sister was studying my face, and now, put- 
ting her hand on mine, she said, "Listen!" And 
I listened, sadly, since I could guess what was 
coming. 

"I know," she said, "just what is at the back 
of your mind, and all these innumerable vil- 



A WILTSHIRE VILLAGE 117 

lages you are amusing yourself by revisiting, is 
but a beginning, a preliminary canter. For not 
only is it the idea of the village and the mental 
colour in which it dyes its children's mind 
which fades never, however far they may go, 
though it may be to die at last in remote lands 

and seas " 

Here I interrupted, ''O yes! Do you remem- 
ber a poet's lines to the little bourne in his child- 
hood's home? A poet in that land where poetry 
is a rare plant — I mean Scotland. I mean the 
lines: 

How men that niver have kenned aboot it 
Can lieve their after lives withoot it 
I canna tell, for day and nicht 
It comes unca'd for to my sicht. 

"Yes," she replied, smiling sadly, and then, 
mocking my bad Scotch, "and do ye ken that 
ither one, a native too of that country where, as 
you say, poetry is a rare plant; that great wan- 
derer over many lands and seas, seeker after 
summer everlasting, who died thousands of 
miles from home in a tropical island, and was 
borne to his grave on a mountain top by the 
dark-skinned barbarous islanders, weeping and 



ii8 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

lamenting their dead Tusitala, and the lines he 
wrote — do you remember? 

Be it granted to me to behold you again in dying, 
Hills of my home! and to hear again the call — 

Hear about the graves of the martyrs, the pee-vvees crying, 
And hear no more at all! 

*'Oh, I was foolish to quote those lines on a 
Scotch burn to you, knowing how you would 
take such a thing up ! For you are the very soul 
of sadness — a sadness that is like a cruelty — and 
for all your love, my sister, you would have 
killed me with your sadness had I not refused 
to listen so many many times!" 

"No! No! No! Listen now to what I had to 
say without interrupting me again: All this 
about the villages, viewed from up there where 
the lark sings, is but a preliminary — a little play 
to deceive yourself and me. For, all the time 
you are thinking of other things, serious and 
some exceedingly sad — of those who live not in 
villages but in dreadful cities, who are like 
motherless men who have never known a 
mother's love and have never had a home on 
earth. And you are like one who has come 
upon a cornfield, ripe for the harvest with you 



A WILTSHIRE VILLAGE 119 

alone to reap it. And viewing it you pluck an 
ear of corn, and rub the grains out in the palm 
of your hand, and toss them up, laughing and 
playing with them like a child, pretending you 
are thinking of nothing, yet all the time think- 
ing — thinking of the task before you. And pres- 
ently you will take to the reaping and reap until 
the sun goes down, to begin again at sunrise to 
toil and sweat again until evening. Then, lift- 
ing your bent body with pain and difficulty, you 
will look to see how little you have done, and 
that the field has widened and now stretches 
away before you to the far horizon. And in 
despair you will cast the sickle away and 
abandon the task." 

"What then, O wise sister, would you have 
me do?" 

"Leave it now, and save yourself this fresh 
disaster and suffering." 

"So be it! I cannot but remember that there 
have been many disasters — more than can be 
counted on the fingers of my two hands — which 
I would have saved myself if I had listened 
when I turned a deaf ear to you. But tell me, 
do you mind just a little more innocent play on 



I20 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

my part — just a little picture of, say, one of the 
villages viewed a while ago from under the 
cloud — or perhaps two?" 

And Psyche, my sister, having won her point 
and pacified me, and conquered my scruples and 
gloom, and seeing me now submissive, smiled a 
gracious consent. 



XIII 
HER OWN VILLAGE 

ONE afternoon when cycling among the 
limestone hills of Derbyshire I came to an 
unlovely dreary-looking little village named 
Chilmorton. It was an exceptionally hot June 
day and I was consumed with thirst: never had 
I wanted tea so badly. Small gritstone-built 
houses and cottages of a somewhat sordid aspect 
stood on either side of the street, but there was 
no shop of any kind and not a living creature 
could I see. It was like a village of the dead 
or sleeping. At the top of the street I came to 
the church standing in the middle of its church- 
yard with the public-house for nearest neigh- 
bour. Here there was life. Going in I found 
it the most squalid and evil-smelling village pub 
I had ever entered. Half a dozen grimy-looking 
labourers were drinking at the bar, and the 
landlord was like them in appearance, with his 
dirty shirt-front open to give his patrons a view 

121 



122 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

of his hairy sweating chest. I asked him to get 
me tea. "Tea!" he shouted, staring at me as if I 
had insulted him; "There's no tea here!" A 
little frightened at his aggressive manner I then 
meekly asked for soda-water, which he gave me, 
and it was warm and tasted like a decoction of 
mouldy straw. After taking a sip and paying 
for it I went to look at the church, which I was 
astonished to find open. 

It was a relief to be in that cool, twilight, not 
unbeautiful interior after my day in the burning 
sun. 

After resting and taking a look round I be- 
came interested in watching and listening to the 
talk of two other visitors who had come in be- 
fore me. One was a slim, rather lean brown- 
skinned woman, still young but with the in- 
cipient crow's-feet, the lines on the forehead, 
the dusty-looking dark hair, and other signs of 
time and toil which almost invariably appear in 
the country labourer's wife before she attains to 
middle age. She was dressed in a black gown, 
presumably her best although it was getting a 
little rusty. Her companion was a fat, red- 
cheeked young girl in a towny costume, a straw 



HER OWN VILLAGE 123 

hat decorated with bright flowers and ribbons, 
and a string of big coloured beads about her 
neck. 

In a few minutes they went out, and when 
going by me I had a good look at the woman's 
face, for it was turned towards me with an eager 
questioning look in her dark eyes and a very 
friendly smile on her lips. What was the attrac- 
tion I suddenly found in that sunburnt face? — 
what did it say to me or remind me of? — ^what 
did it suggest? 

I followed them out to where they were stand- 
ing talking among the gravestones, and sitting 
down on a tomb near them spoke to the woman. 
She responded readily enough, apparently 
pleased to have some one to talk to, and pretty 
soon began to tell me the history of their lives. 
She told me that Chilmorton was her native 
place, but that she had been absent from it many 
many years. She knew just how many years be- 
cause her child was only six months old when 
she left and was now fourteen though she looked 
more. She was such a big girl! Then her man 
took them to his native place in Staffordshire, 
where they had lived ever since. But their girl 



124 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

didn't live with them now. An aunt, a sister of 
her husband, had taken her to the town where 
she lived, and was having her taught at a private 
school. As soon as she left school her aunt 
hoped to get her a place in a draper's shop. For 
a long time past she had wanted to show her 
daughter her native place, but had never been 
able to manage it because it was so far to come 
and they didn't have much money to spend; but 
now at last she had brought her and was showing 
her everything. 

Glancing at the girl who stood listening but 
with no sign of interest in her face, I remarked 
that her daughter would perhaps hardly think 
the journey had been worth taking. 

"Why do you say that?" she quickly de- 
manded. 

"Oh well," I replied, "because Chilmorton 
can't have much to interest a girl living in a 
town." Then I foolishly went on to say what 
I thought of Chilmorton. The musty taste of 
that warm soda-water was still in my mouth and 
made me use some pretty strong words. 

At that she flared up and desired me to know 
that in spite of what I thought it Chilmorton 



HER OWN VILLAGE 125 

was the sweetest, dearest village in England; 
that she was born there and hoped to be buried 
in its churchyard where her parents were lying, 
and her grandparents and many others of her 
family. She was thirty-six years old now, she 
said, and would perhaps live to be an old 
woman, but it would make her miserable for all 
the rest of her life if she thought she would 
have to lie in the earth at a distance from Chil- 
morton. 

During this speech I began to think of the 
soft reply it would now be necessary for me to 
make, when, having finished speaking, she called 
sharply to her daughter, "Come, we've others 
to see yet," and, followed by the girl, walked 
briskly away without so much as a good-bye, or 
even a glance ! 

Oh you poor foolish woman, thought I; why 
take it to heart like that! and I was sorry and 
laughed a little as I went back down the street. 

It was beginning to wake up now! A man in 
his shirt sleeves and without a hat, a big angry 
man, was furiously hunting a rebellious pig all 
round a small field adjoining a cottage, trying 
to corner it; he swore and shouted, and out of 



126 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

the cottage came a frowsy-looking girl in a 
ragged gown with her hair hanging all over her 
face, to help him with the pig. A little further 
on I caught sight of yet another human being, 
a tall gaunt old woman in cap and shawl, who 
came out of a cottage and moved feebly towards 
a pile of faggots a few yards from the door. 
Just as she got to the pile I passed, and she 
slowly turned and gazed at me out of her dim 
old eyes. Her wrinkled face was the colour of 
ashes and was like the face of a corpse, still 
bearing on it the marks of suffering endured 
for many miserable years. And these three were 
the only inhabitants I saw on my way down the 
street. 

At the end of the village the street broadened 
to a clean white road with high ancient hedge- 
row elms on either side, their upper branches 
meeting and forming a green canopy over it. As 
soon as I got to the trees I stopped and dis- 
mounted to enjoy the delightful sensation the 
shade produced: there out of its power I could 
best appreciate the sun shining in splendour on 
the wide green hilly earth and in the green 
translucent foliage above my head. In the 



HER OWN VILLAGE 127 

Upper branches a blackbird was trolling out his 
music in his usual careless leisurely manner; 
when I stopped under it the singing was sus- 
pended for half a minute or so, then resumed, 
but in a lower key, which made it seem softer, 
sweeter, inexpressibly beautiful. 

There are beautiful moments in our converse 
with nature when all the avenues by which na- 
ture comes to our souls seem one, when hearing 
and seeing and smelling and feeling are one 
sense, when the sweet sound that falls from a 
bird, is but the blue of heaven, the green of 
earth, and the golden sunshine made audible. 

Such a moment was mine, as I stood under the 
elms listening to the blackbird. And looking 
back up the village street I thought of the 
woman in the churchyard, her sun-parched 
eager face, her questioning eyes and friendly 
smile: what was the secret of its attraction? — 
what did that face say to me or remind me of? 
— what did it suggest? 

Now it was plain enough. She was still a 
child at heart, in spite of those marks of time 
and toil on her countenance, still full of wonder 
and delight at this wonderful world of Chilmor- 



128 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

ton set amidst its limestone hills, under the wide 
blue sky — this poor squalid little village where 
I couldn't get a cup of tea! 

It was the child surviving in her which had 
attracted and puzzled me; it does not often shine 
through the dulling veil of years so brightly. 
And as she now appeared to me as a child in 
heart I could picture her as a child in years, in 
her little cotton frock and thin bare legs, a sun- 
burnt little girl of eight, with the wide-eyed, 
eager, half-shy, half-trustful look, asking you, as 
the child ever asks, what you think? — what you 
feel? It was a wonderful world, and the world 
was the village, its streets of gritstone houses, the 
people living in them, the comedies and trage- 
dies of their lives and deaths, and burials in the 
churchyard with grass and flowers to grow over 
them by-and-by. And the church; — I think its 
interior must have seemed vaster, more beauti- 
ful and sublime to her wondering little soul than 
the greatest cathedral can be to us. I think that 
our admiration for the loveliest blooms — the 
orchids and roses and chrysanthemums at our 
great annual shows — is a poor languid feeling 
compared to what she experienced at the sight 



HER OWN VILLAGE 129 

of any common flower of the field. Best of all 
perhaps were the elms at the village end, those 
mighty rough-barked trees that had their tops 
"so close against the sky." And I think that 
when a blackbird chanced to sing in the upper 
branches it was as if some angelic being had 
dropped down out of the sky into that green 
translucent cloud of leaves, and seeing the 
child's eager face looking up had sung a little 
song of his own celestial country to please her. 



XIV 

APPLE BLOSSOMS AND A LOST 
VILLAGE 

THE apple has not come to its perfection 
this season until the middle of May; even 
here, in this west country, the very home of the 
spirit of the apple tree! Now it is, or seems, all 
the more beautiful because of its lateness, and 
of an April of snow and sleet and east winds, the 
bitter feeling of which is hardly yet out of our 
blood. If I could recover the images of all the 
flowering apple trees I have ever looked de- 
lightedly at, adding those pictured by poets and 
painters, including that one beneath which 
Fiammetta is standing, forever, with that fresh 
glad face almost too beautiful for earth, looking 
out as from pink and white clouds of the multi- 
tudinous blossoms — if I could see all that, I 
could not find a match for one of the trees of 
to-day. It is like nothing in earth, unless we 
say that, indescribable in its loveliness, it is like 

130 



APPLE BLOSSOMS AND A LOST VILLAGE 131 

all Other sights in nature which wake in us a 
sense of the supernatural. 

Undoubtedly the apple trees seem more beau- 
tiful to us than all other blossoming trees, in all 
lands we have visited, just because it is so com- 
mon, so universal — I mean in this west country 
— so familiar a sight to everyone from infancy, 
on which account it has more associations of a 
tender and beautiful kind than the others. For 
however beautiful it may be intrinsically, the 
greatest share of the charm is due to the mem- 
ories that have come to be part of and one with 
it — the forgotten memories they may be called. 
For they mostly refer to a far period in our 
lives, to our early years, to days and events that 
were happy and sad. The events themselves 
have faded from the mind, but they registered 
an emotion, cumulative in its effect, which en- 
dures and revives from time to time and is that 
indefinable feeling, that tender melancholy and 
"divine despair," and those idle tears of which 
the poet says, "I know not what they mean," 
which gather to the eyes at the sight of happy 
autumn fields and of all lovely natural sights 
familiar from of old. 



132 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

To-day, however, looking at the apple blooms, 
I find the most beautifying associations and 
memories not in a far-off past, but in visionary 
apple trees seen no longer ago than last autumn! 

And this is how it comes about. In this red 
and green country of Devon I am apt to meet 
with adventures quite unlike those experienced 
in other counties, only they are mostly adven- 
tures of the spirit. 

Lying awake at six o'clock last October, in 
Exeter, and seeing it was a grey misty morning, 
my inclination was to sleep again. I only dozed 
and was in the twilight condition when the mind 
is occupied with idle images and is now in the 
waking world, now in dreamland. A thought 
of the rivers in the red and green country floated 
through my brain — of the Clyst among others; 
then of the villages on the Clyst; of Broadclyst, 
Clyst St. Mary, Clyst St. Lawrence, finally of 
Clyst Hyden; and although dozing I half 
laughed to remember how I went searching for 
that same village last May and how I wouldn't 
ask my way of anyone, just because it was Clyst 
Hyden, because the name of that little hidden 
rustic village had been written in the hearts of 



APPLE BLOSSOMS AND A LOST VILLAGE 133 

some who had passed away long ago, far far 
from home: — how then could I fail to find it? — 
it would draw my feet like a magnet! 

I remembered how I searched among deep 
lanes, beyond rows and rows of ancient hedge- 
row elms, and how I found its little church and 
thatched cottages at last, covered with ivy and 
roses and creepers, all in a white and pink cloud 
of apple blossoms. Searching for it had been 
great fun and finding it a delightful experi- 
ence; why not have the pleasure once more now 
that it was May again and the apple orchards in 
blossom? No sooner had I asked myself the 
question than I was on my bicycle among those 
same deep lanes, with the unkept hedges and 
the great hedgerow elms shutting out a view of 
the country, searching once more for the village 
of Clyst Hyden. And as on the former occasion, 
years ago it seemed, I would not enquire my 
way of anyone. I had found it then for myself 
and was determined to do so again, although I 
had set out with the vaguest idea as to the right 
direction. 

But hours went by and I could not find it, and 
now it was growing late. Through a gap in the 



134 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

hedge I saw the great red globe of the sun quite 
near the horizon, and immediately after seeing 
it I was in a narrow road with a green border, 
which stretched away straight before me fur- 
ther than I could see. Then the thatched cot- 
tages of a village came into sight; all were on 
one side of the road, and the setting sun flamed 
through the trees had kindled road and trees 
and cottages to a shining golden flame. 

'This is it!" I cried. "This is my little lost 
village found again, and it is well I found it 
so late in the day, for now it looks less like even 
the loveliest old village in Devon than one in 
fairyland, or in Beulah." 

When I came near it that sunset splendour 
did not pass off and it was indeed like no earthly 
village; then people came out from the houses 
to gaze at me, and they too were like people 
glorified with the sunset light and their faces 
shone as they advanced hurriedly to meet me, 
pointing with their hands and talking and laugh- 
ing excitedly as if my arrival among them had 
been an event of great importance. In a mo- 
ment they surrounded and crowded round me, 
and sitting still among them looking from ra- 



APPLE BLOSSOMS AND A LOST VILLAGE 135 

diant face to face I at length found my speech 
and exclaimed, '^O how beautiful!" 

Then a girl pressed forward from among the 
others, and putting up her hand she placed it on 
my temple, the fingers resting on my forehead; 
and gazing with a strange earnestness in my eyes 
she said: "Beautiful? — only that! Do you see 
nothing more?" 

I answered, looking back into her eyes: "Yes 
— I think there is something more but I don't 
know what it is. Does it come from you — your 
eyes — your voice, all this that is passing in my 
mind?" 

"What is passing in your mind?" she asked. 

"I don't know. Thoughts — perhaps mem- 
ories: hundreds, thousands — they come and go 
like lightning so that I can't arrest them — not 
even one!" 

She laughed, and the laugh was like her eyes 
and her voice and the touch of her hand on my 
temples. 

Was it sad or glad? I don't know, but it was 
the most beautiful sound I had ever heard, yet 
it seemed familiar and stirred me in the 
strangest way. 



136 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

"Let me think," I said. 

"Yes, think!" they all together cried laugh- 
ingly; and then instantly when I cast my eyes 
down there was a perfect stillness as if they 
were all holding their breath and watching me. 

That sudden strange stillness startled me: I 
lifted my eyes and they were gone — the radiant 
beautiful people who had surrounded and inter- 
rogated me, and with them their shining golden 
village, had all vanished. There was no village, 
no deep green lanes and pink and white clouds 
of apple blossoms, and it was not May, it was 
late October and I was lying in bed in Exeter 
seeing through the window the red and grey 
roofs and chimneys and pale misty white sky. 



XV 

THE VANISHING CURTSEY 

•ry^IS impossible not to regret the dying out of 
-■- the ancient, quaintly-pretty custom of 
curtseying in rural England; yet we cannot but 
see the inevitableness of it, when we consider 
the earthward drop of the body — the bird-like 
gesture pretty to see in the cottage child, not so 
spontaneous nor pretty in the grown girl, and 
not pretty nor quaint, but rather grotesque (as 
we think now) in the middle-aged or elderly 
person — and that there is no longer a corre- 
sponding self-abasement and worshipping atti- 
tude in the village mind. It is a sign or symbol 
that has lost, or is losing, its significance. 

I have been rambling among a group of 
pretty villages on and near the Somerset Avon, 
some in that county, others in Wiltshire; and 
though these small rustic centres, hidden among 
the wooded hills, had an appearance of anti- 

137 



138 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

quity and of having continued unchanged for 
very many years, the little ones were as modern 
in their speech and behaviour as town children. 
Of all those I met and, in many instances, spoke 
to, in the village street and in the neighbouring 
woods and lanes, not one little girl curtseyed to 
me. The only curtsey I had dropped to me in 
this district was from an old woman in the small 
hill-hidden village of Englishcombe. It was on 
a frosty afternoon in February, and she stood 
near her cottage gate with nothing on her head, 
looking at the same time very old and very 
young. Her eyes were as blue and bright as a 
child's, and her cheeks were rosy- red; but the 
skin was puckered with innumerable wrinkles 
as in the very old. Surprised at her curtsey I 
stopped to speak to her, and finally went into her 
cottage and had tea and made the acquaintance 
of her husband, a gaunt old man with a face 
grey as ashes and dim colourless eyes, whom 
Time had made almost an imbecile, and who sat 
all day groaning by the fire. Yet this worn-out 
old working man was her junior by several 
years. Her age was eighty-four. She was very 
good company, certainly the brightest and live- 



THE VANISHING CURTSEY 139 

liest of the dozen or twenty octogenarians I am 
acquainted with. I heard the story of her life, — 
that long life in the village where she was born 
and had spent sixty-five years of married life, 
and where she would lie in the churchyard with 
her mate. Her Christian name, she mentioned, 
was Priscilla, and it struck me that she must 
have been a very pretty and charming Priscilla 
about the thirties of the last century. 

To return to the little ones; it was too near 
Bath for such a custom to survive among them, 
and it is the same pretty well everywhere; you 
must go to a distance of ten or twenty miles 
from any large town, or a big station, to meet 
with curtseying children. Even in villages at a 
distance from towns and railroads, in purely 
agricultural districts, the custom is dying out, if, 
for some reason, strangers are often seen in the 
place. Such a village is Selborne, and an amus- 
ing experience I met with there some time ago 
serves to show that the old rustic simplicity of 
its inhabitants is now undergoing a change. 

I was walking in the village street with a lady 
friend when we noticed four little girls coming 
towards us with arms linked. As they came near 



I40 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

they suddenly stopped and curtseyed all to- 
gether in an exaggerated manner, dropping till 
their knees touched the ground, then springing to 
their feet they walked rapidly away. From the 
bold, free, easy way in which the thing was done 
it was plain to see that they had been practising 
the art in something of a histrionic spirit for the 
benefit of the pilgrims and strangers frequently 
seen in the village, and for their own amuse- 
ment. As the little Selbornians walked off they 
glanced back at us over their shoulders, exhibit- 
ing four roguish smiles on their four faces. The 
incident greatly amused us, but I am not sure 
that the Reverend Gilbert White would have re- 
garded it in the same humorous light. 

Occasionally one even finds a village where 
strangers are not often seen, which has yet out- 
lived the curtsey. Such a place, I take it, is 
Alvediston, the small downland village on the 
upper waters of the Ebble, in southern Wilt- 
shire. One day last summer I was loitering near 
the churchyard, when a little girl, aged about 
eight, came from an adjoining copse with some 
wild flowers in her hand. She was singing as 
she walked and looked admiringly at the flowers 



THE VANISHING CURTSEY 141 

she carried; but she could see me watching her 
out of the corners of her eyes. 

''Good morning," said I. "It is nice to be out 
gathering flowers on such a day, but why are 
you not in school?" 

"Why am I not in school?" in a tone of sur- 
prise. "Because the holidays are not over. On 
Monday we open." 

"How delighted you will be." 

"Oh no, I don't think I shall be delighted," 
she returned. Then I asked her for a flower, 
and apparently much amused she presented me 
with a water forget-me-not, then she sauntered 
on to a small cottage close by. Arrived there, 
she turned round and faced me, her hand on the 
gate, and after gazing steadily for some mo- 
ments exclaimed, "Delighted at going back to 
school — who ever heard such a thing?" and, 
bursting into a peal of musical child-laughter, 
she went into the cottage. 

One would look for curtseys in the Flower 
Walk in Kensington Gardens as soon as in the 
hamlet of this remarkably self-possessed little 
maid. Her manner was exceptional; but, if we 
must lose the curtsey, and the rural little ones 



142 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

cease to mimic that pretty drooping motion of 
the nightingale, the kitty wren, and wheatear, 
cannot our village pastors and masters teach 
them some less startling and offensive form of 
salutation than the loud ''Hullo!" with which 
they are accustomed to greet the stranger within 
their gates? 

I shall finish with another story which might 
be entitled "The Democrat against Curtseying." 
The scene was a rustic village, a good many 
miles from any railroad station, in the south of 
England. Here I made the acquaintance and 
was much in the society of a man who was not 
a native of the place, but had lived several years 
in it. Although only a working man, he had, by 
sheer force of character, made himself a power 
in the village. A total abstainer and non- 
smoker, a Dissenter in religion and lay-preacher 
where Dissent had never found a foothold until 
his coming, and an extreme Radical in politics, 
he was naturally something of a thorn in the side 
of the vicar and of the neighbouring gentry. 

But in spite of his extreme views and opposi- 
tion to old cherished ideas and conventions, he 
was so liberal-minded, so genial in temper, so 



THE VANISHING CURTSEY 143 

human, that he was very much liked even by 
those who were his enemies on principle; and 
they were occasionally glad to have his help and 
to work with him in any matter that concerned 
the welfare of the very poor in the village. 

After the first bitterness between him and the 
important inhabitants had been outlived and a 
modus Vivendi established, the vicar ventured 
one day to remonstrate with the good but mis- 
taken man on the subject of curtseying, which 
had always been strictly observed in the village. 
The complaint was that the parishioner's wife 
did not curtsey to the vicaress, but on the con- 
trary, when she met or passed her on the road 
she maintained an exceedingly stifif, erect atti- 
tude, which was not right, and far from pleasant 
to the other. 

"Is it then your desire," said my democratic 
friend, "that my wife shall curtsey to your wife 
when they meet or pass each other in the vil- 
lage?" 

"Certainly, that is my wish," said the vicar. 

"Very well," said the other; "my wife is 
guided by me in such matters, and I am very 
happy to say that she is an obedient wife, and I 



144 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

shall tell her that she is to curtsey to your wife 
in future." 

"Thank you," said the vicar, "I am glad that 
you have taken it in a proper spirit." 

''But I have not yet finished," said the other. 
"I was going to add that this command to my 
wife to curtsey to your wife will be made by 
me on the understanding that you will give a 
similar command to your wife, and that when 
they meet and my wife curtseys to your wife, 
your wife shall at the same time curtsey to my 
wife." 

The vicar was naturally put out and sharply 
told his rebellious parishioner that he was set- 
ting himself against the spirit of the teaching of 
the Master whom they both acknowledged, and 
who commanded us to give to everyone his due, 
with more to the same effect. But he failed to 
convince, and there was no curtseying. 

It was sometimes pleasant and amusing to see 
these two — the good old clergyman, weak and 
simple-minded, and his strong antagonist, the 
aggressive working man with his large frame 
and genial countenance and great white flowing 
beard — a Walt Whitman in appearance — work- 



THE VANISHING CURTSEY 145 

ing together for some good object in the village. 
It was even more amusing, but touching as 
well, to witness an unexpected meeting between 
the two wives, perhaps at the door of some poor 
cottage, to which both had gone on the same 
beautiful errand of love and compassion to some 
stricken soul, and exchanging only a short 
*'Good-day," the democrat's wife stiffening her 
knee-joints so as to look straighter and taller 
than usual. 



XVI 
LITTLE GIRLS I HAVE MET 

PERHAPS some reader who does not know a 
little girl her psychology, after that ac- 
count of the Alvediston maidie who presented 
me with a flower with an arch expression on 
her face just bordering on a mocking smile, will 
say, 'What a sophisticated child to be surel" 
He would be quite wrong unless we can say that 
the female child is born sophisticated, which 
sounds rather like a contradiction in terms. That 
appearance of sophistication, common in little 
girls even in a remote rustic village hidden away 
among the Wiltshire downs, is implicit in, and 
a quality of the child's mind — the female child, 
it will be understood — and is the first sign of the 
flirting instinct which shows itself as early as 
the maternal one. This, we know, appears as 
soon as a child is able to stand on its feet, per- 
haps even before it quits the cradle. It seeks to 
gratify itself by mothering something, even an 

146 



LITTLE GIRLS I HAVE MET 147 

inanimate something, so that it is as common to 
put a doll in a baby-child's hands as it is to put 
a polished cylindrical bit of ivory — I forget the 
name of it — in its mouth. The child grows up 
nursing this image of itself, whether with or 
without a wax face, blue eyes and tow-coloured 
hair, and if or when the unreality of the doll be- 
gins to spoil its pleasure, it will start mothering 
something with life in it — a kitten for prefer- 
ence, and if no kitten, or puppy or other such 
creature easy to be handled or cuddled, is at 
hand, it will take kindly to any mild-mannered 
old gentleman of its circle. 

It is just these first instinctive impulses of the 
girl-child, combined with her imitativeness and 
wonderful precocity, which make her so fascin- 
ating. But do they think? They do, but this 
first early thinking does not make them self- 
conscious as does their later thinking, to the 
spoiling of their charm. The thinking indeed 
begins remarkably early. I remember one child, 
a little five-year-old and one of my favourites, 
climbing to my knee one day and exhibiting a 
strangely grave face. "Doris, what makes you 
look so serious?" I asked. And after a few mo- 



148 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

ments of silence, during which she appeared to 
be thinking hard, she startled me by asking me 
what was the use of living, and other questions 
which it almost frightened me to hear from 
those childish innocent lips. Yet I have seen 
this child grow up to womanhood — a quite com- 
monplace conventional woman, who when she 
has a child of her own of five would be unspeak- 
ably shocked to hear from it the very things she 
herself spoke at that tender age. And if I were 
to repeat to her now the words she spoke (the 
very thought of Byron in his know-that-w^hat- 
ever - thou - hast - been - 'Twere - something - 
better-not-to-be poem) she would not believe it. 

It is, however, rare for the child mind in its 
first essays at reflection to take so far a flight. It 
begins as a rule like the fledgling by climbing 
with difficulty out of the nest and on to the near- 
est branches. 

It is interesting to observe these first move- 
ments. Quite recently I met with a child of 
about the same age as the one just described, 
who exhibited herself to me in the very act of 
trying to climb out of the nest — trying to grasp 
something with her claws, so to speak, and pull 



LITTLE GIRLS I HAVE MET 149 

herself up. She was and is a very beautiful 
child, full of life and fun and laughter, and 
came out to me when I was sitting on the lawn 
to ask me for a story. 

''Very well," I said. "But you must wait for 
half an hour until I remember all about it before 
I begin. It is a long story about things that 
happened a long time ago." 

She waited as patiently as she could for about 
three minutes, and then said: "What do you 
mean by a long time ago?" 

I explained, but could see that I had not made 
her understand, and at last put it in days, then 
weeks, then seasons, then years, until she ap- 
peared to grasp the meaning of a year, and then 
finished by saying a long time ago in this case 
meant a hundred years. 

Again she was at a loss, but still trying to 
understand she asked me: "What is a hundred 
years?" 

"Why, it's a hundred years," I replied. "Can 
you count to a hundred?" 

"I'll try," she said, and began to count and got 
to nineteen, then stopped. I prompted her, and 
she went on to twenty-nine, and so on, hesitating 



ISO A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

after each nine, until she reached fifty. 'That's 
enough," I said, ''it's too hard to go the whole 
way; but now don't you begin to understand 
what a hundred years means?" 

She looked at me and then away, and her 
beautiful blue intelligent eyes told me plainly 
that she did not, and that she felt baffled and 
worried. 

After an interval she pointed to the hedge. 
"Look at the leaves," she said. "I could go and 
count a hundred leaves, couldn't I? Well, would 
that be a hundred years?" 

And no further could we get, since I could not 
make out just what the question meant. At first 
it looked as if she thought of the leaves as an 
illustration — or a symbol; and then that she had 
failed to grasp the idea of time, or that it had 
slipped from her, and she had fallen back, as 
it were, to the notion that a hundred meant a 
hundred objects, which you could see and feel. 
There appeared to be no way out of the puzzle- 
dom into which we had both got, so that it came 
as a relief to both of us when she heard her 
mother calling — calling her back into a world 
she could understand. 



z' 



LITTLE GIRLS I HAVE MET 151 

I believe that when we penetrate to the real 
mind of girl children we find a strong likeness 
in them even when they appear to differ as 
widely from one another as adults do. The dif- 
ference in the little ones is less in disposition and 
character than in unlikeness due to unconscious 
imitation. They take their mental colour from 
their surroundings. The red men of America 
are the gravest people on the globe, and their 
children are like them when with them; but 
this unnatural gravity is on the surface and is a 
mask which drops or fades off when they as- 
semble together out of sight and hearing of their 
elders. In like manner our little ones have 
masks to fit the character of the homes they are 
bred in. 

Here I recall a little girl I once met when I 
was walking somewhere on the borders of Dor- 
set and Hampshire. It was at the close of an 
autumn day, and I was on a broad road in a level 
stretch of country with the low buildings of a 
farmhouse a quarter of a mile ahead of me, and 
no other building in sight. A lonely land with 
but one living creature in sight — a very small 
girl, slowly coming towards me, walking in the 



152 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

middle of the wet road; for it had been raining 
a greater part of the day. It was amazing to 
see that wee solitary being on the lonely road, 
with the wide green and brown earth spreading 
away to the horizon on either side under the 
wide pale sky. She was a sturdy little thing of 
about five years old, in heavy clothes and cloth 
cap, and long knitted muffler wrapped round 
her neck and crossed on her chest, then tied or 
bound round her waist, thick boots and thick 
leggings! And she had a round serious face, 
and big blue eyes with as much wonder in them 
at seeing me as I suppose mine expressed at see- 
ing her. When we were still a little distance 
apart she drew away to the opposite side of the 
road, thinking perhaps that so big a man would 
require the whole of its twenty-five yards width 
for himself. But no, that was not the reason of 
her action, for on gaining the other side she 
stopped and turned so as to face me when I 
should be abreast of her, and then at the proper 
moment she bent her little knees and dropped 
me an elaborate curtsey; then, rising again to 
her natural height, she continued regarding me 
with those wide-open astonished eyes! 



LITTLE GIRLS I HAVE MET 153 

Nothing In little girls so dellciously quaint 
and old-worldish had ever come in my way be- 
fore; and though it was late in the day and the 
road long, I could not do less than cross over to 
speak to her. She belonged to a cottage I had 
left some distance behind, and had been to the 
farm with a message and was on her way back, 
she told me, speaking with slow deliberation and 
profound respect, as to a being of a higher 
order than man. Then she took my little gift 
and after making a second careful curtsey pro- 
ceeded slowly and gravely on her way. 

Undoubtedly all this unsmiling, deeply re- 
spectful manner was a mask, or we may go so 
far as to call it second nature, and was the result 
of living in a cottage in an agricultural district 
with adults or old people : — probably her grand- 
mother was the poor little darling's model, and 
any big important-looking man she met was the 
lord of the manor! 

What an amazing difference outwardly be- 
tween the rustic and the city child of a society 
woman, accustomed to be addressed and joked 
with and caressed by scores of persons every day 
— her own people, friends, visitors, strangers! 



154 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Such a child I met last summer at a west-end 
shop or emporium where women congregate in 
a colossal tea-room under a glass dome, with 
glass doors opening upon an acre of flat 
roof. 

There, one afternoon, after drinking my tea I 
walked away to a good distance on the roof and 
sat down to smoke a cigarette, and presently saw 
a charming-looking child come dancing out 
from among the tea-drinkers. Round and round 
she whirled, heedless of the presence of all those 
people, happy and free and wild as a lamb run- 
ning a race with itself on some green flowery 
down under the wide sky. And by-and-by she 
came near and was pirouetting round my chair, 
when I spoke to her, and congratulated her on 
having had a nice holiday at the seaside. One 
knew it from her bare brown legs. Oh yes, she 
said, it was a nice holiday at Bognor, and she 
had enjoyed it very much. 

"Particularly the paddling," I remarked. 

No, there was no paddling — her mother 
wouldn't let her paddle. 

"What a cruel mother!" I said, and she 
laughed merrily, and we talked a little longer, 



LITTLE GIRLS I HAVE MET 155 

and then seeing her about to go, I said, "you 
must be just seven years old." 

"No, only five," she replied. 

"Then," said I, "you must be a wonderfully 
clever child." 

"Oh yes, I know I'm clever," she returned 
quite naturally, and away she went, spinning 
over the wide space, and was presently lost in 
the crowd. 

A few minutes later a pleasant-looking but 
dignified lady came out from among the tea- 
drinkers and bore down directly on me. "I 
hear," she said, "you've been talking to my little 
girl, and I want you to know I was very sorry 
I couldn't let her paddle. She was just recov- 
ering from whooping-cough when I took her to 
the seaside, and I was afraid to let her go in the 
water." 

I commended her for her prudence, and apol- 
ogised for having called her cruel, and after a 
few remarks about her charming child, she went 
her way. 

And now I have no sooner done with this 
little girl than another cometh up as a flower 
in my memory and I find I'm compelled to 



iS6 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

break off. There are too many for me. It is 
true that the child's beautiful life is a brief one, 
like that of the angel-insect, and may be told in 
a paragraph ; yet if I were to write only as many 
of them as there are "Lives" in Plutarch it 
would still take an entire book — an octavo of at 
least three hundred pages. But though I can't 
write the book I shall not leave the subject just 
yet, and so will make a pause here, to continue 
the subject in the next sketch, then the next to 
follow, and probably the next after that. 



XVII 
MILLICENT AND ANOTHER 

THEY were two quite small maidies, aged 
respectively four and six years with some 
odd months in each case. They are older now 
and have probably forgotten the stranger to 
whom they gave their fresh little hearts, who 
presently left their country never to return; for 
all this happened a long time ago — I think 
about three years. In a way they were rivals, 
yet had never seen one another, perhaps never 
will, since they inhabit two villages more than 
a dozen miles apart in a wild, desolate, hilly 
district of West Cornwall. 

Let me first speak of Millicent, the elder. I 
knew Millicent well, having at various times 
spent several weeks with her in her parents' 
house, and she, an only child, was naturally re- 
garded as the most important person in it. In 
Cornwall it is always so. Tall for her years, 
straight and slim, with no red colour on her 

157 



158 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

cheeks; she had brown hair and large serious 
grey eyes; those eyes and her general air of 
gravity, and her forehead, which was too broad 
for perfect beauty, made me a little shy of her 
and we were not too intimate. And, indeed, that 
feeling on my part, which made me a little care- 
ful and ceremonious in our intercourse, seemed 
to be only what she expected of me. One day 
in a forgetful or expansive moment I happened 
to call her "Millie," which caused her to look 
to me in surprise. "Don't you like me to call 
you Millie — for short?" I questioned apologet- 
ically. "No," she returned gravely; "it is not 
my name — my name is Millicent." And so it 
had to be to the end of the chapter. 

Then there was her speech — I wondered how 
she got it! For it was unlike that of the people 
she lived among of her own class. No word- 
clipping and slurring, no "naughty English" as 
old Nordin called it, and sing-song intonation 
with her! She spoke with an almost startling 
distinctness, giving every syllable its proper 
value, and her words were as if they had been 
read out of a nicely written book. 

Nevertheless, we got on fairly well together. 



MILLICENT AND ANOTHER 159 

meeting on most days at tea-time in the kitchen, 
when we would have nice sober little talks and 
look at her lessons and books and pictures, some- 
times unbending so far as to draw pigs on her 
slate with our eyes shut, and laughing at the re- 
sult just like ordinary persons. 

It was during my last visit, after an absence 
of some months from that part of the country, 
that one evening on coming in I was told by her 
mother that Millicent had gone for the milk, 
and that I would have to wait for my tea till 
she came back. Now the farm that supplied 
the milk was away at the other end of the vil- 
lage, quite half a mile, and I went to meet her, 
but did not see her until I had walked the whole 
distance, when just as I arrived at the gate she 
came out of the farm-house burdened with a 
basket of things in one hand and a can of milk 
in the other. She graciously allowed me to re- 
lieve her of both, and taking basket and can with 
one hand I gave her the other, and so, hand in 
hand, very friendly, we set off down the long, 
bleak, windy road just when it was growing 
dark. 

"I'm afraid you are rather thinly clad for this 



i6o A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

bleak December evening," I remarked. "Your 
little hand feels cold as ice." 

She smiled sweetly and said she was not feel- 
ing cold, after which there was a long interval of 
silence. From time to time we met a villager, 
a fisherman in his ponderous sea-boots, or a 
farm-labourer homeward plodding his weary 
way. But though heavy-footed after his day's 
labour he is never so stolid as an English 
ploughman is apt to be; invariably when giving 
us a good-night in passing the man would smile 
and look at Millicent very directly with a 
meaning twinkle in his Cornish eye. He might 
have been congratulating her on having a male 
companion to pay her all these nice little atten- 
tions, and perhaps signalling the hope that 
something would come of it. 

Grave little Millicent, I was pleased to ob- 
serve, took no notice of this Cornubian foolish- 
ness. At length when we had walked half the 
distance home, in perfect silence, she said im- 
pressively: "Mr. Hudson, I have something I 
want to tell you very much." 

I begged her to speak, pressing her cold little 
hand. 



MILLICENT AND ANOTHER i6i 

She proceeded: "I shall never forget that 
morning when you went away the last time. You 
said you were going to Truro; but I'm not sure 
— perhaps it was to London. I only know that 
it was very far away, and you were going for a 
very long time. It was early in the morning, 
and I was in bed. You know how late I always 
am. I heard you calling to me to come down 
and say good-bye; so I jumped up and came 
down in my nightdress and saw you standing 
waiting for me at the foot of the stairs. Then, 
when I got down, you took me up in your arms 
and kissed me. I shall never forget it!" 

'Why?" I said, rather lamely, just because it 
was necessary to say something. And after a 
little pause, she returned, "Because I shall never 
forget it." 

Then, as I said nothing, she resumed: ''That 
day after school I saw Uncle Charlie and told 
him, and he said: 'What! you allowed that 
tramp to kiss you! then I don't want to take you 
on my knee any more — you've lowered yourself 
too much.'' " 

"Did he dare to say that?" I returned. 

"Yes, that's what Uncle Charlie said, but it 



i62 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

makes no difference. I told him you were not a 
tramp, Mr. Hudson, and he said you could call 
yourself Mister-what-you-liked but you were a 
tramp all the same, nothing but a common 
tramp, and that I ought to be ashamed of my- 
self. 'You've disgraced the family,' that's what 
he said, but I don't care — I shall never forget 
it, the morning you went away and took me up 
in your arms and kissed me." 

Here was a revelation! It saddened me, and 
I made no reply although I think she expected 
one. And so after a minute or two of uncom- 
fortable silence she repeated that she would 
never forget it. For all the time I was thinking 
of another and sweeter one who was also a per- 
son of importance in her own home and village 
over a dozen miles away. 

In thoughtful silence we finished our talk; 
then there were lights and tea and general con- 
versation; and if Millicent had intended return- 
ing to the subject she found no opportunity then 
or afterwards. 

It was better so, seeing that the other charac- 
ter possessed my whole heart. 



MILLICENT AND ANOTHER 163 

She was not intellectual; no one would have 
said of her, for example, that she would one day 
blossom into a second Emily Bronte; that to 
future generations her wild moorland village 
would be the Haworth of the West. She was 
perhaps something better — a child of earth and 
sun, exquisite, with her flossy hair a shining, 
chestnut gold, her eyes like the bugloss, her 
whole face like a flower or rather like a ripe 
peach in bloom and colour; we are apt to asso- 
ciate these delicious little being with flavours as 
well as fragrances. But I am not going to be so 
foolish as to attempt to describe her. 

Our first meeting was at the village spring, 
where the women came with pails and pitchers 
for water; she came, and sitting on the stone rim 
of the basin into which the water gushed, re- 
garded me smilingly, with questioning eyes. I 
started a conversation, but though smiling she 
was shy. Luckily I had my luncheon, which 
consisted of fruit, in my satchel, and telling her 
about it she grew interested and confessed to me 
that of all good things fruit was what she loved 
best. I then opened my stores, and selecting the 



i64 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

brightest yellow and richest purple fruits, told 
her that they were for her — on one condition — 
that she would love me and give me a kiss. And 
she consented and came to me. O that kiss ! And 
what more can I find to say of it? Why noth- 
ing, unless one of the poets, Crawshaw for pref- 
erence, can tell me. "My song," I might say 
with that mystic, after an angel had kissed him 
in the morning, 

Tasted of that breakfast all day long. 

From that time we got on swimmingly, and 
were much in company, for soon, just to be near 
her, I went to stay at her village. I then made 
the discovery that Mab, for that is what they 
called her, although so unlike, so much softer 
and sweeter than Millicent, was yet like her in 
being a child of character and of an indomitable 
will. She never cried, never argued, or listened 
to arguments, never demonstrated after the 
fashion of wilful children generally, by throw- 
ing herself down screaming and kicking; she 
simply very gently insisted on having her own 
way and living her own life. In the end she 
always got it, and the beautiful thing was that 



MILLICENT AND ANOTHER 165 

she never wanted to be naughty or do anything 
really wrong! She took a quite wonderful in- 
terest in the life of the little community, and 
would always be where others were, especially 
when any gathering took place. Thus, long be- 
fore I knew her at the age of four, she made the 
discovery that the village children, or most of 
them, passed much of their time in school, and 
to school she accordingly resolved to go. Her 
parents opposed, and talked seriously to her and 
used force to restrain her, but she overcame 
them in the end, and to the school they had to 
take her, where she was refused admission on 
account of her tender years. But she had re- 
solved to go, and go she would; she laid siege 
to the schoolmistress, to the vicar, who told me 
how day after day she would come to the door 
of the vicarage, and the parlour-maid would 
come rushing into his study to announce, "Miss 
Mab to speak to you Sir," and how he would 
talk seriously to her, and then tell her to run 
home to her mother and be a good child. But 
it was all in vain, and in the end, because of her 
importunity or sweetness, he had to admit her. 
When I went, during school hours, to give a 



1 66 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

talk to the children, there I found Mab, one of 
the forty, sitting with her book, which told her 
nothing, in her little hands. She listened to the 
talk with an appearance of interest, although 
understanding nothing, her bugloss eyes on me, 
encouraging me with a very sweet smile, when- 
ever I looked her way. 

It was the same about attending church. Her 
parents went to one service on Sundays; she in- 
sisted on going to all three, and would sit and 
stand and kneel, book in hand, as if taking a part 
in it all, but always when you looked at her, her 
eyes would meet yours and the sweet smile 
would come to her lips. 

I had been told by her mother that Mab 
would not have dolls and toys, and this fact, 
recalled at an opportune moment, revealed to 
me her secret mind — her baby philosophy. We, 
the inhabitants of the village, grown-ups and 
children as well as the domestic animals, were 
her playmates and playthings, so that she was 
independent of sham blue-eyed babies made of 
sawdust and cotton and inanimate fluffy Teddy- 
bears; she was in possession of the real thing! 
The cottages, streets, the church and school, the 



MILLICENT AND ANOTHER 167 

fields and rocks and hills and sea and sky were 
all contained in her nursery or playground; and 
we, her fellow-beings, were all occupied from 
morn to night in an endless complicated game, 
which varied from day to day according to the 
weather and time of year, and had many beauti- 
ful surprises. She didn't understand it all, but 
was determined to be in it and get all the fun 
she could out of it. This mental attitude came 
out strikingly one day when we had a funeral — 
always a feast to the villagers; that is to say, an 
emotional feast; and on this occasion the cir- 
cumstances made the ceremony a peculiarly im- 
pressive one. 

A young man, well known and generally 
liked, son of a small farmer, died with tragic 
suddenness, and the little stone farm-house being 
situated away on the borders of the parish, the 
funeral procession had a considerable distance 
to walk to the village. To the church I went 
to view its approach; built on a rock, the church 
stands high in the centre of the village, and 
from the broad stone steps in front one got a 
fine view of the inland country and of the pro- 
cession like an immense black serpent winding 



i68 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

along over green fields and stiles, now disap- 
pearing in some hollow ground or behind grey 
masses of rock, then emerging on the sight, and 
the voices of the singers bursting out loud and 
clear in that still atmosphere. 

When I arrived on the steps Mab was already 
there; the whole village would be at that spot 
presently, but she was first. On that morning no 
sooner had she heard that the funeral was going 
to take place than she gave herself a holiday 
from school and made her docile mother dress 
her in her daintiest clothes. She welcomed me 
with a glad face and put her wee hand in mine; 
then the villagers — all those not in the proces- 
sion — began to arrive, and very soon we were in 
the middle of a throng; then, as the six coffin- 
bearers came slowly toiling up the many steps, 
and the singing all at once grew loud and swept 
as a big wave of sound over us, the people were 
shaken with emotion, and all the faces, even of 
the oldest men, were wet with tears — all except 
ours, Mab's and mine. 

Our tearless condition — our ability to keep 
dry when it was raining, so to say — resulted 
from quite different causes. Mine just then 



MILLICENT AND ANOTHER 169 

were the eyes of a naturalist curiously observing 
the demeanour of the beings around me. To 
Mab the whole spectacle was an act, an inter- 
lude, or scene in that wonderful endless play 
which was a perpetual delight to witness and in 
which she too was taking a part. And to see all 
her friends, her grown-up playmates, enjoying 
themselves in this unusual way, marching in a 
procession to the church, dressed in black, sing- 
ing hymns with tears in their eyes — why, this 
was even better than school or Sunday service, 
romps in the playground or a children's tea. 
Every time I looked down at my little mate she 
lifted a rosy face to mine with her sweetest smile 
and bugloss eyes aglow with ineffable happiness. 
And now that we are far apart my loveliest 
memory of her is as she appeared then. I would 
not spoil that lovely image by going back to look 
at her again. Three years! It was said of Lewis 
Carroll that he ceased to care anything about 
his little Alices when they had come to the age 
of ten. Seven is my limit : they are perfect then : 
but in Mab's case the peculiar exquisite charm 
could hardly have lasted beyond the age of six. 



XVIII 
FRECKLES 

MY meeting with Freckles only served to 
confirm me in the belief, almost amount- 
ing to a conviction, that the female of our species 
reaches its full mental development at an extra- 
ordinarily early age compared to that of the 
male. In the male the receptive and elastic or 
progressive period varies greatly; but judging 
from the number of cases one meets with of men 
who have continued gaining in intellectual 
power to the end of their lives, in spite of phys- 
ical decay, it is reasonable to conclude that the 
stationary individuals are only so because of the 
condition of their lives having been inimical. 
In fact, stagnation strikes us as an unnatural con- 
dition of mind. The man who dies at fifty or 
sixty or seventy, after progressing all his life, 
doubtless would, if he had lived a lustrum or a 
decade longer, have attained to a still greater 
height. "How disgusting it is," cried Ruskin, 

170 



FRECKLES 171 

when he had reached his threescore years and 
ten, "to find that just when one's getting inter- 
ested in life one has got to die!" Many can say 
as much; all could say it, had not the mental 
machinery been disorganised by some accident, 
or become rusted from neglect and carelessness. 
He who is no more in mind at sixty than at thirty 
is but a half-grown man : his is a case of arrested 
development. 

It is hardly necessary to remark here that the 
mere accumulation of knowledge is not the same 
thing as power of mind and its increase : the man 
who astonishes you with the amount of knowl- 
edge stored in his brain may be no greater in 
mind at seventy than at twenty. 

Comparing the sexes again, we might say that 
the female mind reaches perfection in child- 
hood, long before the physical change from a 
generalised to a specialised form; whereas the 
male retains a generalised form to the end of 
life and never ceases to advance mentally. The 
reason is obvious. There is no need for con- 
tinued progression in women, and Nature, like 
the grand old economist she is, or can be when 
she likes, matures the mind quickly in one case 



172 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

and slowly in the other; so slowly that he, the 
young male, goes crawling on all fours as it 
were, a long distance after his little flying sister 
— slowly because he has very far to go and must 
keep on for a very, very long time. 

I met Freckles in one of those small ancient 
out-of-the-world market towns of the West of 
England — Somerset to be precise — which are 
just like large old villages, where the turnpike 
road is for half a mile or so a High Street, wide 
at one point, where the market is held. For a 
short distance there are shops on either side, suc- 
ceeded by quiet dignified houses set back among 
trees, then by thatched cottages, after which suc- 
ceed fields and woods. 

I had lunched at the large old inn at noon on a 
hot summer's day; when I sat down a black 
cloud was coming up, and by-and-by there was 
thunder, and when I went to the door it was 
raining heavily. I leant against the frame of the 
door, sheltered from the wet by a small tiled 
portico over my head, to wait for the storm to 
pass before getting on my bicycle. Then the 
innkeeper's child, aged five, came out and 
placed herself against the door-frame on the 



FRECKLES 173 

Other side. We regarded one another with a 
good deal of curiosity, for she was a queer- 
looking little thing. Her head, big for her size 
and years, was as perfectly round as a Dutch 
cheese, and her face so thickly freckled that it 
was all freckles; she had confluent freckles, and 
as the spots and blotches were of different 
shades, one could see that they overlapped like 
the scales of a fish. Her head was bound tightly 
round with a piece of white calico, and no hair 
appeared under it. 

Just to open the conversation, I remarked that 
she was a little girl rich in freckles. 

"Yes, I know," she returned, "there's no one 
in the town with such a freckled face." 

"And that isn't all," I went on. "Why is your 
head in a night-cap or a white cloth as if you 
wanted to hide your hair? or haven't you got 
any?" 

"I can tell you about that," she returned, not 
in the least resenting my personal remarks. "It 
is because I've had ringworms. My head is 
shaved and I'm not allowed to go to school." 

"Well," I said, "all these unpleasant experi- 
ences — ringworm, shaved head, freckles, and 



174 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

expulsion from school as an undesirable person 
— do not appear to have depressed you much. 
You appear quite happy." 

She laughed good-humouredly, then looked 
up out of her blue eyes as if asking what more 
I had to say. 

Just then a small girl about thirteen years 
old passed us — a child with a thin anxious face 
burnt by the sun to a dark brown, and deep-set, 
dark blue, penetrating eyes. It was a face to 
startle one; and as she went by she stared in- 
tently at the little freckled girl. 

Then I, to keep the talk going, said I could 
guess the sort of life that child led. 

"What sort of life does she lead?" asked 
Freckles. 

She was, I said, a child from some small farm 
in the neighbourhood, and had a very hard life, 
and was obliged to do a great deal more work 
indoors and out than was quite good for her at 
her tender age. "But I wonder why she stared 
at you?" I concluded. 

"Did she stare at me! — ^Why did she stare?" 

"I suppose it was because she saw you, a mite 
of a child, with a nightcap on her head, standing 



FRECKLES 175 

here at the door of the inn talking to a stranger 
just like some old woman." 

She laughed again, and said it was funny for 
a child of five to be called an old woman. Then, 
with a sudden change to gravity, she assured me 
that I had been quite right in what I had said 
about that little girl. She lived with her 
parents on a small farm, where no maid was 
kept, and the little girl did as much work or 
more than any maid. She had to take the cows 
to pasture and bring them back; she worked in 
the fields and helped in the cooking and wash- 
ing, and came every day to the town with a bas- 
ket of butter, and eggs, which she had to deliver 
at a number of houses. Sometimes she came 
twice in a day, usually in a pony-cart, but when 
the pony was wanted by her father she had to 
come on foot with the basket, and the farm was 
three miles out. On Sunday she didn't come, 
but had a good deal to do at home. 

"Ah, poor little slave! No wonder she gazed 
at you as she did ; — she was thinking how sweet 
your life must be with people to love and care 
for you and no hard work to do." 

"And was that what made her stare at me. 



176 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

and not because I had a nightcap on and was 
like an old woman talking to a stranger?" This 
without a smile. 

"No doubt. But you seem to know a great 
deal about her. Now I wonder if you can tell 
me something about this beautiful young lady 
with an umbrella coming towards us? I should 
much like to know who she is — and I should 
like to call on her." 

"Yes, I can tell you all about her. She is Miss 
Eva Langton, and lives at the White House. 
You follow the street till you get out of the town 
where there is a pond at this end of the common, 
and just a little the other side of the pond there 
are big trees, and behind the trees a white gate. 
That's the gate of the White House, only you 
can't see it because the trees are in the way. Are 
you going to call on her?" 

I explained that I did not know her, and 
though I wished I did because she was so pretty, 
it would not perhaps be quite right to go to her 
house to see her. 

"I'm sorry you're not going to call, she's such 
a nice young lady. Everybody likes her." And 
then, after a few moments, she looked up with 



FRECKLES i77 

a smile, and said, "Is there anything else I can 
tell you about the people of the town? There's 
a man going by in the rain with a lot of planks 
on his head — would you like to know who he is 
and all about him?" 

"Oh yes, certainly," I replied. "But of course 
I don't care so much about him as I do about 
that little brown girl from the farm, and the nice 
Miss Langton from the White House. But it's 
really very pleasant to listen to you whatever 
you talk about. I really think you one of the 
most charming little girls I have ever met, and 
I wonder what you will be like in another five 
years. I think I must come and see for myself." 

"Oh, will you come back in five years? Just 
to see me! My hair will be grown then and I 
won't have a nightcap on, and I'll try to wash 
ofi the freckles before you come." 

"No, don't," I said. "I had forgotten all 
about them — I think they are very nice." 

She laughed, then looking up a little archly, 
said: "You are saying all that just for fun, are 
you not?" 

"Oh no, nothing of the sort. Just look at me, 
and say if you do not believe what I tell you." 



178 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

"Yes, I do," she answered frankly enough, 
looking full in my eyes with a great seriousness 
in her own. 

That sudden seriousness and steady gaze; that 
simple, frank declaration! Would five years 
leave her in that stage? I fancy not, for at ten 
she would be self-conscious, and the loss would 
be greater than the gain. No, I would not 
come back in five years to see what she was like. 

That was the end of our talk. She looked 
towards the wet street and her face changed, 
and with a glad cry she darted out. The rain 
was over, and a big man in a grey tweed coat was 
coming across the road to our side. She met 
him half-way, and bending down he picked her 
up and set her on his shoulder and marched with 
her into the house. 

There were others, it seemed, who were able 
to appreciate her bright mind and could forget 
all about her freckles and her nightcap. 



XIX 

ON CROMER BEACH 

IT is true that when little girls become self- 
conscious they lose their charm, or the best 
part of it; they are at their best as a rule from 
five to seven, after which begins a slow, almost 
imperceptible decline (or evolution, if you 
like) until the change is complete. The charm 
in decline was not good enough for Lewis Car- 
roll; the successive little favourites, we learn, 
were always dropped at about ten. That was 
the limit. Perhaps he perceived, with a rare 
kind of spiritual sagacity resembling that of 
certain animals with regard to approaching 
weather-changes, that something had come into 
their heart, or would shortly come, which would 
make them no longer precious to him. But that 
which had made them precious was not far to 
seek: he would find it elsewhere, and could af- 
ford to dismiss his Alice for the time being from 
his heart and life, and even from his memory, 
without a qualm. 

179 



i8o A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

To my seven-years' rule there are, however, 
many exceptions — little girls who keep the 
child's charm in spite of the changes which 
years and a newly developing sense can bring to 
them. I have met with some rare instances of 
the child being as much to us at ten as at five. 

One instance which I have in my mind just 
now is of a little girl of nine, or perhaps nearly 
ten, and it seemed to me in this case that this 
new sense, the very quality which is the spoiler 
of the child-charm, may sometimes have the ef- 
fect of enhancing it or revealing it in a new and 
more beautiful aspect. 

I met her at Cromer, where she was one of a 
small group of five visitors; three ladies, one 
old, the others middle-aged, and a middle-aged 
gentleman. He and one of the two younger 
ladies were perhaps her parents, and the elderly 
lady her grandmother. What and who these 
people were I never heard, nor did I enquire; 
but the child attracted me, and in a funny way 
we became acquainted, and though we never ex- 
changed more than a dozen words, I felt that we 
were quite intimate and very dear friends. 

The little group of grown-ups and the child 



ON CROMER BEACH i8i 

were always together on the front, where I was 
accustomed to see them sitting or slowly walking 
up and down, always deep in conversation and 
very serious, always regarding the more or less 
gaudily attired females on the parade with an 
expression of repulsion. They were old-fash- 
ioned in dress and appearance, invariably in 
black — black silk and black broadcloth. I con- 
cluded that they were serious people, that they 
had inherited and faithfully kept a religion, or 
religious temper, which has long been outlived 
by the world in general — a puritanism or Evan- 
gelicalism dating back to the far days of Wil- 
berforce and Hannah More and the ancient 
Sacred order of Claphamites. 

And the child was serious with them and kept 
pace with them with slow staid steps. But she 
was beautiful, and under the mask and mantle 
which had been imposed on her had a shin- 
ing child's soul. Her large eyes were blue, the 
rare blue of a perfect summer's day. There was 
no need to ask her where she had got that 
colour; undoubtedly in heaven "as she came 
through." The features were perfect, and she 
was pale, or so it had seemed to me at first, but 



i82 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

when viewing her more closely I saw that colour 
was an important element in her loveliness — a 
colour so delicate that I fell to comparing her 
flower-like face with this or that particular 
flower. I had thought of her as a snowdrop at 
first, then a windflower, the March anemone, 
with its touch of crimson, then various white, 
ivory, and cream-coloured blossoms with a 
faintly-seen pink blush to them. 

Her dress, except the stocking, was not 
black; it was grey or dove-colour, and over it a 
cream or pale-fawn-coloured cloak with hood, 
which with its lace border seemed just the right 
setting for the delicate puritan face. She 
walked in silence while they talked and talked, 
ever in grave subdued tones. Indeed it would 
not have been seemly for her to open her lips in 
such company. I called her Priscilla, but she 
was also like Milton's pensive nun, devout and 
pure, only her looks were not commercing with 
the skies; they were generally cast down, al- 
though it is probable that they did occasionally 
venture to glance at the groups of merry pink- 
legged children romping with the waves below. 

I had seen her three or four or more times 



ON CROMER BEACH 183 

on the front before we became acquainted; and 
she too had noticed me, just raising her blue eyes 
to mine when we passed one another, with a shy 
sweet look of recognition in them — a question- 
ing look; so that we were not exactly strangers. 
Then, one morning, I sat on the front when the 
black-clothed group came by, deep in serious 
talk as usual, the silent child with them, and 
after a turn or two they sat down beside me. 
The tide was at its full and children were com- 
ing down to their old joyous pastime of pad- 
dling. They were a merry company. After 
watching them I glanced at my little neighbour 
and caught her eyes, and she knew what the 
question in my mind was — ^Why are not you 
with them? And she was pleased and troubled 
at the same time, and her face was all at once 
in a glow of beautiful colour; it was the colour 
of the almond blossom; — her sister flower on 
this occasion. 

A day or two later we were more fortunate. 
I went before breakfast to the beach and was 
surprised to find her there watching the tide 
coming in; in a moment of extreme indulgence 
her mother, or her people, had allowed her to 



i84 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

run down to look at the sea for a minute by her- 
self. She was standing on the shingle, watching 
the green waves break frothily at her feet, her 
pale face transfigured with a gladness which 
seemed almost unearthly. Even then in that 
emotional moment the face kept its tender 
flower-like character; I could only compare it 
to the sweet-pea blossom, ivory white or deli- 
cate pink; that Psyche-like flower with wings 
upraised to fly, and expression of infantile in- 
nocence and fairy-like joy in life. 

I walked down to her and we then exchanged 
our few and only words. How beautiful the sea 
was, and how delightful to watch the waves 
coming in! I remarked. She smiled and replied 
that it was very, very beautiful. Then a bigger 
wave came and compelled us to step hurriedly 
back to save our feet from a wetting, and we 
laughed together. Just at that spot there was 
a small rock on which I stepped and asked her 
to give me her hand, so that we could stand to- 
gether and let the next wave rush by without 
wetting us. "Oh, do you think I may?" she 
said, almost frightened at such an adventure. 
Then, after a moment's hesitation, she put her 



ON CROMER BEACH 185 

hand in mine, and we stood on the little frag- 
ment of rock, and she watched the water rush up 
and surround us and break on the beach with 
a fearful joy. And after that wonderful experi- 
ence she had to leave me; she had only been 
allowed out by herself for five minutes, she said, 
and so, after a grateful smile, she hurried back. 
Our next encounter was on the parade, where 
she appeared as usual with her people, and noth- 
ing beyond one swift glance of recognition and 
greeting could pass between us. But it was a 
quite wonderful glance she gave me, it said so 
much: — that we had a great secret between us 
and were friends and comrades for ever. It 
would take half a page to tell all that was con- 
veyed in that glance. "I'm so glad to see you," 
it said, "I was beginning to fear you had gone 
away. And now how unfortunate that you see 
me with my people and we cannot speak! They 
wouldn't understand. How could they, since 
they don't belong to our world and know what 
we know? If I were to explain that we are 
different from them, that we want to play to- 
gether on the beach and watch the waves and 
paddle and build castles, they would say, 'Oh 



i86 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

yes, that's all very well, but — ' I shouldn't know 
what they meant by that, should you? I do 
hope we'll meet again some day and stand once 
more hand in hand on the beach — don't you?" 
And with that she passed on and was gone, 
and I saw her no more. Perhaps that glance 
which said so much had been observed, and she 
had been hurriedly removed to some place of 
safety at a great distance. But though I never 
saw her again, never again stood hand in hand 
with her on the beach and never shall, I have 
her picture to keep in all its flowery freshness 
and beauty, the most delicate and lovely per- 
haps of all the pictures I possess of the little 
girls I have met. 



XX 

DIMPLES 

IT is not pleasant when you have had your 
say, made your point to your own satisfaction, 
and gone cheerfully on to some fresh subject, 
to be assailed with the suspicion that your in- 
terlocutor is saying mentally: All very well — 
very pretty talk, no doubt, but you haven't con- 
vinced me, and I even doubt that you have suc- 
ceeded in convincing yourself! 

For example, a reader of the foregoing notes 
may say: "If you really find all this beauty and 
charm and fascination you tell us in some little 
girls, you must love them. You can't admire 
and take delight in them as you can in a piece 
of furniture, or tapestry, or a picture or statue 
or a stone of great brilliancy and purity of 
colour, or in any beautiful inanimate object, 
without that emotion coming in to make itself 
part of and one with your admiration. You 
can't, simply because a child is a human being, 
and we do not want to lose sight of the being 

187 



i88 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

we love. So long as the love lasts, the eye would 
follow its steps because — we are what we are, 
and a mere image in the mind doesn't satisfy the 
heart. Love is never satisfied, and asks not for 
less and less each day but for more — always for 
more. Then, too, love is credulous; it believes 
and imagines all things and, like all emotions, 
it pushes reason and experience aside and sticks 
to the belief that these beautiful qualities can- 
not die and leave nothing behind: they are not 
on the surface only; they have their sweet 
permanent roots in the very heart and centre 
of being." 

That, I suppose, is the best argument on the 
other side, and if you look straight at it for six 
seconds, you will see it dissolve like a lump of 
sugar in a tumbler of water and disappear 
under your very eyes. For the fact remains 
that when I listen to the receding footsteps of 
my little charmer, the sigh that escapes me 
expresses something of relief as well as regret. 
The signs of change have perhaps not yet ap- 
peared, and I wish not to see them. Good-bye, 
little one, we part in good time, and may we 
never meet again! 



DIMPLES 189 

' Undoubtedly one loses something, but it can- 
not balance the gain. The loss in any case was 
bound to come, and had I waited for it no gain 
would have been possible. As it is, I am like 
that man in The Pilgrim's Progress, by some 
accounted mad, who the more he cast away the 
more he had. And the way of it is this; by los- 
ing my little charmers before they cease from 
charming, I make them mine for always, in a 
sense. They are made mine because my mind 
(other minds, too) is made that way. That 
which I see with delight I continue to see when 
it is no more there, and will go on seeing to the 
end: at all events I fail to detect any sign of de- 
cay or fading in these mind pictures. There are 
people with money who collect gems — dia- 
monds, rubies and other precious stones — who 
value their treasures as their best possessions, 
and take them out from time to time to examine 
and gloat over them. These things are trash to 
me compared with the shining, fadeless images 
in my mind, which are my treasures and best 
possessions. But the bright and beauteous im- 
ages of the little girl charmers would not have 
been mine if instead of letting the originals dis- 



I90 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

appear from my ken I had kept them too long 
in it. All because our minds, our memories are 
made like that. If we see a thing once, or sev- 
eral times, we see it ever after as we first saw 
it; if we go on seeing it every day or every week 
for years and years, we do not register a count- 
less series of new distinct impressions, record- 
ing all its changes: the new impressions fall 
upon and obliterate the others, and it is like a 
series of photographs, not arranged side by side 
for future inspection, but in a pile, the top one 
alone remaining visible. Looking at this insipid 
face you would not believe, if told, that once 
upon a time it was beautiful to you and had a 
great charm. The early impressions are lost, 
the charm forgotten. 

This reminds me of the incident I set out to 
narrate when I wrote "Dimples" at the head of 
this note. I was standing at a busy corner in 
a Kensington thoroughfare waiting for a bus, 
when a group of three ladies appeared and came 
to a stand a yard or two from me and waited, 
too, for the traffic to pass before attempting to 
cross to the other side. One was elderly and 
feeble and was holding the arm of another of 



DIMPLES 191 

the trio, who was young and pretty. Her age 
was perhaps twenty; she was of medium height, 
slim, with a nice figure and nicely dressed. She 
was a blonde, with light blue-grey eyes and 
fluffy hair of pale gold: there was little colour 
in her face, but the features were perfect and 
the mouth with its delicate curves quite beauti- 
ful. 

But after regarding her attentively for a 
minute or so, looking out impatiently for my 
bus at the same time, I said mentally: "Yes, you 
are certainly very pretty, perhaps beautiful, 
but I don't like you and I don't want you. 
There's nothing in you to correspond to that 
nice outside. You are an exception to the rule 
that the beautiful is the good. Not that you are 
bad — actively, deliberately bad — you haven't 
the strength to be that or anything else; you 
have only a little shallow mind and a little cold- 
ish heart." 

Now I can imagine one of my lady readers 
crying out: "How dared you say such mon- 
strous things of any person after just a glance 
at her face?" 

Listen to me, madam, and you will agree that 



192 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

I was not to blame for saying these monstrous 
things. All my life I've had the instinct or 
habit of seeing the things I see; that is to say, 
seeing them not as cloud or mist-shapes for ever 
floating past, nor as people in endless proces- 
sion "seen rather than distinguished," but dis- 
tinctly, separately, as individuals each with a 
character and soul of its very own; and while 
seeing it in that way some little unnamed faculty 
in some obscure corner of my brain hastily scrib- 
bles a label to stick on to the object or person 
before it passes out of sight. It can't be pre- 
vented; it goes on automatically; it isn't me, and 
I can no more interfere or attempt in any way 
to restrain or regulate its action than I can take 
my legs to task for running up a flight of steps 
without the mind's supervision. 

But I haven't finished with the young lady 
yet. I had no sooner said what I have said and 
was just about to turn my eyes away and forget 
all about her, when, in response to some remarks 
of her aged companion, she laughed, and in 
laughing so great a change came into her face 
that it was as if she had been transformed into 
another being. It was like a sudden breath of 



DIMPLES 193 

wind and a sunbeam falling on the still cold 
surface of a woodland pool. The eyes, icily 
cold a moment before, had warm sunlight in 
them, and the half-parted lips with a flash of 
white teeth between them had gotten a new 
beauty; and most remarkable of all was a 
dimple which appeared and in its swift motions 
seemed to have a life of its own, flitting about 
the corner of the mouth, then further away to 
the middle of the cheek and back again. A 
dimple that had a story to tell. For dimples, 
too, like a delicate, mobile mouth, and even 
like eyes, have a character of their own. And 
no sooner had I seen that sudden change in the 
expression, and especially the dimple, than I 
knew the face; it was a face I was familiar with 
and was like no other face in the world, yet I 
could not say who she was nor where and when 
I had known her! Then, when the smile faded 
and the dimple vanished, she was a stranger 
again — the pretty young person with the shal- 
low brain that I did not like! 

Naturally my mind worried itself with this 
puzzle of a being with two distinct expressions, 
one strange to me, the other familiar, and it 



194 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

went on worrying me all that day until I could 
stand it no longer, and to get rid of the matter, 
I set up the theory (which didn't quite convince 
me) that the momentary expression I had seen 
was like an expression in some one I had known 
in the far past. But after dismissing the sub- 
ject in that way, the subconscious mind was still 
no doubt working at it, for two days later it all 
at once flashed into my mind that my mysterious 
young lady was no other than the little Lillian I 
had known so well eight years before! She was 
ten years old when I first knew her, and I was 
quite intimately acquainted with her for a little 
over a year, and greatly admired her for her 
beauty and charm, especially when she smiled 
and that dimple flew about the corner of her 
mouth like a twilight moth vaguely fluttering 
at the rim of a red flower. But alas! her charm 
was waning: she was surrounded by relations 
who adored her, and was intensely self-consci- 
ous, so that when after a year her people moved 
to a new district, I was not sorry to break the 
connection, and to forget all about her. 

Now that I had seen and remembered her 
again, it was a consolation to think that she was 



DIMPLES 195 

already in her decline when I first knew and 
was attracted by her and on that account had 
never wholly lost my heart to her. How dif- 
ferent my feelings would have been if after pro- 
nouncing that irrevocable judgment, I had 
recognised one of my vanished darlings — one, 
say, like that child on Cromer Beach, or of 
dozens of other fairylike little ones I have 
known and loved, and whose images are endur- 
ing and sacred! 



xxr 

WILD FLOWERS AND LITTLE GIRLS 

^T^HINKING of the numerous company of 
-■- little girls of infinite charm I have met, 
and of their evanishment, I have a vision of my- 
self on horseback on the illimitable green level 
pampas, under the wide sunlit cerulean sky in 
late September or early October, when the wild 
flowers are at their best before the wilting heats 
of summer. 

Seeing the flowers so abundant, I dismount 
and lead my horse by the bridle and walk knee- 
deep in the lush grass, stooping down at every 
step to look closely at the shy, exquisite blooms 
in their dewy morning freshness and divine col- 
ours. Flowers of an inexpressible unearthly 
loveliness and unforgettable; for how forget 
them when their images shine in memory in all 
their pristine morning brilliance! 

That is how I remember and love to remem- 
196 



WILD FLOWERS AND LITTLE GIRLS 197 

ber them, in that first fresh aspect, not as they 
appear later, the petals wilted or dropped, sun- 
browned, ripening their seed and fruit. 

And so with the little human flowers. I love 
to remember and think of them as flowers, not 
as ripening or ripened into young ladies, wives, 
matrons, mothers of sons and daughters. 

As little girls, as human flowers, they shone 
and passed out of sight. Only of one do I think 
differently, the most exquisite among them, the 
most beautiful in body and soul, or so I imagine, 
perhaps because of the manner of her vanishing 
even while my eyes were still on her. That was 
Dolly, aged eight, and because her little life fin- 
ished then she is the one that never faded, never 
changed. 

Here are some lines I wrote when grief at her 
going was still fresh. They were in a monthly 
magazine at that time years ago, and were set to 
music, although not very successfully, and I 
wish it could be done again. 



Should'st thou come to me again 
From the sunshine and the rain, 
With thy laughter sweet and free, 
O how should I welcome thee! 



igS A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Like a streamlet dark and cold 
Kindled into fiery gold 
By a sunbeam swift that cleaves 
Downward through the curtained leaves; 

So this darkened life of mine 
Lit with sudden joy would shine, 
And to greet thee I should start 
With a great cry in my heart. 

Back to drop again, the cry 
On my trembling lips would die: 
Thou would'st pass to be again 
With the sunshine and the rain. 



XXII 

A LITTLE GIRL LOST 

\7"ET once more, O ye little girls, I come to 
■^ bid you a last good-bye — a very last one 
this time. Not to you, living little girls, seeing 
that I must always keep a fair number of you 
on my visiting list, but to a fascinating theme I 
had to write about. For I did really and truly 
think I had quite finished with it, and now all 
at once I find myself compelled by a will 
stronger than my own to make this one further 
addition. The will of a little girl who is not 
present and is lost to me — a wordless message 
from a distance, to tell me that she is not to be 
left out of this gallery. And no sooner has her 
message come than I find there are several good 
reasons why she should be included, the first and 
obvious one being that she will be a valuable 
acquisition, an ornament to the said gallery. 
And here I will give a second reason, a very 
important one (to the psychological minded at 

199 



200 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

all events), but not the. most important of all, 
for that must be left to the last. 

In the foregoing impressions of little girls I 
have touched on the question of the child's age 
when that "little agitation in the brain called 
thought," begins. There were two remarkable 
cases given; one, the child who climbed upon 
my knee to amaze and upset me by her pessi- 
mistic remarks about life; the second, my little 
friend Nesta — that was her name and she is still 
on my visiting list — ^who revealed her callow 
mind striving to grasp an abstract idea — the 
idea of time apart from some visible or tangible 
object. Now these two were aged five years; 
but what shall we say of the child, the little girl- 
child who steps out of the cradle, so to speak, 
as a being breathing thoughtful breath? 

It makes me think of the cradle as the cocoon 
or chrysalis in which, as by a miracle (for here 
natural and supernatural seem one and the 
same), the caterpillar has undergone his trans- 
formation and emerging spreads his wings and 
forthwith takes his flight a full-grown butterfly 
with all its senses and faculties complete. 

Walking on the sea front at Worthing one 



A LITTLE GIRL LOST 201 

late afternoon in late November, I sat down at 
one end of a seat in a shelter, the other end being 
occupied by a lady in black, and between us, 
drawn close up to the seat, was a perambulator 
in which a little girl was seated. She looked at 
me, as little girls always do, with that question 
— What are you? in her large grey intelligent 
eyes. The expression tempted me to address 
her, and I said I hoped she was quite well. 

"O yes," she returned readily. "I am quite 
well, thank you." 

''And may I know how old you are?" 

"Yes, I am just three years old.' 

I should have thought, I said, that as she 
looked a strong healthy child she would have 
been able to walk and run about at the age of 
three. 

She replied that she could walk and run as 
well as any child, and that she had her pram 
just to sit and rest in when tired of walking. 

Then, after apologising for putting so many 
questions to her, I asked her if she could tell me 
her name. 

"My name," she said, "is Rose Mary Cath- 
erine Maude Caversham," or some such name. 



202 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

"Oh!" exclaimed the lady in black, opening 
her lips for the first time, and speaking sharply. 
*'You must not say all those names ! It is enough 
to say your name is Rose." 

The child turned and looked at her, studying 
her face, and then with heightened colour and 
with something like indignation in her tone, she 
replied: "That is my name! Why should I not 
tell it when I am asked?" 

The lady said nothing, and the child turned 
her face to me again. 

I said it was a very pretty name and I had 
been pleased to hear it, and glad she told it to 
me without leaving anything out. 

Silence still on the part of the lady. 

"I think," I resumed, "that you are a rather 
wonderful child; — have they taught you the 
ABC?" 

"Oh no, they don't teach me things like that 
—I pick all that up." 

"And one and one make two — do you pick 
that up as well?" 

"Yes, I pick that up as well." 

"Then," said I, recollecting Humpty- 



A LITTLE GIRL LOST 203 

Dumpty's question in arithmetic to Alice, "how 
much is one-an'-one-an'-one-an'-one-an'-one-an'- 
one?" — speaking it as it should be spoken, very 
rapidly. 

She looked at me quite earnestly for a mo- 
ment, then said, "And can you tell me how 
much is two-an'-two-an'-two-an'-two-an'-two- 
an'-two?" — and several more two's all in a rapid 
strain. 

"No," I said, "you have turned the tables on 
me very cleverly. But tell me, do they teach 
you nothing?" 

"Oh yes, they teach me something!" Then 
dropping her head a little on one side and lift- 
ing her little hands she began practising scales 
on the bar of her pram. Then, looking at me 
with a half-smile on her lips, she said; "That's 
what they teach me." 

After a little further conversation she told me 
she was from London, and was down with her 
people for their holiday. 

I said it seemed strange to me she should be 
having a holiday so late in the season. "Look," 
I said, "at that cold grey sea and the great 



204 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Stretch of sand with only one group of two or 
three children left on it with their little buckets 
and spades." 

"Yes," she said, in a meditative way; "it is 
very late." Then, after a pause, she turned 
towards me with an expression in her face which 
said plainly enough : I am now going to give 
you a little confidential information. Her 
words were : "The fact is we are just waiting for 
the baby." 

"Oh!" screamed the lady in black. "Why 
have you said such a thing! You must not say 
such things!" 

And again the child turned her head and 
looked earnestly, inquiringly at the lady, trying, 
as one could see from her face, to understand 
why she was not to say such a thing. But now 
she was not sure of her ground as on the other 
occasion of being rebuked. There was a mys- 
tery here about the expected baby which she 
could not fathom. Why was it wrong for her 
to mention that simple fact? That question was 
on her face when she looked at her attendant, 
the lady in black, and as no answer was forth- 
coming, either from the lady, or out of her own 



A LITTLE GIRL LOST 205 

head, she turned to me again, the dissatisfied 
expression still in her eyes; then it passed away 
and she smiled. It was a beautiful smile, all 
the more because it came only at rare intervals 
and quickly vanished, because, as it seemed to 
me, she was all the time thinking too closely 
about what was being said to smile easily or 
often. And the rarity of her smile made her 
sense of humour all the more apparent. She 
was not like Marjorie Fleming, that immortal 
little girl, who was wont to be angry when of- 
fensively condescending grown-ups addressed 
her as a babe in intellect. For Marjorie had no 
real sense of humour; all the humour of her 
literary composition, verse and prose, was of 
the unconscious variety. This child was only 
amused at being taken for a baby. 

Then came the parting. I said I had spent a 
most delightful hour with her, and she, smiling 
once more put out her tiny hand, and said in 
the sweetest voice: "Perhaps we shall meet 
again." 

Those last five words! If she had been some 
great lady, an invalid in a bath-chair, who had 
conversed for half an hour with a perfect 



2o6 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Stranger and had wished to express the pleasure 
and interest she had had in the colloquy, she 
could not have said more, nor less, nor said it 
more graciously, more beautifully. 

But we did not meet again, for when I looked 
for her she was not there: she had gone out of 
my life, like Priscilla, and like so many beauti- 
ful things that vanish and return not. 

And now I return to what I said at the be- 
ginning — that there were several reasons for in- 
cluding this little girl in my series of impres- 
sions. The most important one has been left 
until now. I want to meet her again, but how 
shall I find her in this immensity of London — 
these six millions of human souls! Let me beg 
of any reader who knows Rose Mary Angela 
Catherine Maude Caversham — a name like that 
— who has identified her from my description 
— that he will inform me of her whereabouts. 



XXIII 
A SPRAY OF SOUTHERNWOOD 

TO pass from little girls to little boys is to 
go into quite another, an inferior, coarser 
world. No doubt there are wonderful little 
boys, but as a rule their wonderfulness consists 
in a precocious intellect: this kind doesn't ap- 
peal to me, so that if I were to say anything on 
the matter, it would be a prejudiced judgment. 
Even the ordinary civilised little boy, the nice 
little gentleman who is as much at home in the 
drawing-room as at his desk in the school-room 
or with a bat in the playing-field — even that 
harmless little person seems somehow unnatural, 
or denaturalised to my primitive taste. A re- 
sult, I will have it, of improper treatment. He 
has been under the tap, too thoroughly scrubbed, 
boiled, strained and served up with melted but- 
ter and a sprig of parsley for ornament in a gilt- 
edged dish. I prefer him raw, and would rather 
have the street-Arab, if in town, and the un- 
kempt, rough and tough cottage boy in the coun- 

207 



2o8 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

try. But take them civilised or natural, those 
who love and observe little children no more 
expect to find that peculiar exquisite charm of 
the girl-child which I have endeavoured to de- 
scribe in the boy, than they would expect the 
music of the wood-lark and the airy fairy grace 
and beauty of the grey wagtail in Philip Spar- 
row. And yet, incredible as it seems, that very 
quality of the miraculous little girl is sometimes 
found in the boy and, with it, strange to say, 
the boy's proper mind and spirit. The child 
lover will meet with one of that kind once in 
ten years, or not so often — not oftener than a 
collector of butterflies will meet with a Camber- 
well Beauty. The miraculous little girl, we 
know, is not more uncommon than the Painted 
Lady, or White Admiral. And I will here give 
a picture of such a boy — the child associated in 
my mind with a spray of southernwood. 

And after this impression, I shall try to give 
one or two of ordinary little boys. These live in 
memory like the little girls I have written about, 
not, it will be seen, because of their boy nature, 
seeing that the boy has nothing miraculous, 
nothing to capture the mind and register an en- 



A SPRAY OF SOUTHERNWOOD 209 

during impression in it, as in the case of the girl; 
but owing solely to some unusual circumstance 
in their lives — something adventitious. 

It was hot and fatiguing on the Wiltshire 
Downs, and when I had toiled to the highest 
point of a big hill where a row of noble Scotch 
firs stood at the roadside, I was glad to get off 
my bicycle and rest in the shade. Fifty or sixty 
yards from the spot where I sat on the bank 
on a soft carpet of dry grass and pine-needles, 
there was a small, old, thatched cottage, the only 
human habitation in sight except the little vil- 
lage at the foot of the hill, just visible among 
the trees a mile ahead. An old woman in the 
cottage had doubtless seen me going by, for she 
now came out into the road, and, shading her 
eyes with her hand, peered curiously at me. A 
bent and lean old woman in a dingy black dress, 
her face brown and wrinkled, her hair white. 
With her, watching me too, was a little mite of 
a boy; and after they had stood there a while 
he left her and went into the cottage garden, but 
presently came out into the road again and 
walked slowly towards me. It was strange to 



2IO A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

see that child in such a place! He had on a 
scarlet shirt or blouse, wide lace collar, and 
black knickerbockers and stockings; but it was 
his face rather than his clothes that caused me 
to wonder. Rarely had I seen a more beautiful 
child, such a delicate rose-coloured skin, and 
fine features, eyes of such pure intense blue, and 
such shining golden hair. How came this an- 
gelic little being in that poor remote cottage 
with that bent and wrinkled old woman for a 
guardian? 

He walked past me very slowly, a sprig of 
southernwood in his hand; then after going by 
he stopped and turned, and approaching me in 
a shy manner and without saying a word offered 
me the little pale green feathery spray. I took 
it and thanked him, and we entered into conver- 
sation, when I discovered that his little mind 
was as bright and beautiful as his little person. 
He loved the flowers, both garden and wild, but 
above everything he loved the birds; he watched 
them to find their nests; there was nothing he 
liked better than to look at the little spotted 
eggs in the nest. He could show me a nest if I 
wanted to see one, only the little bird was sitting 



A SPRAY OF SOUTHERNWOOD 211 

on her eggs. He was six years old, and that cot- 
tage was his home — he knew no other; and the 
old bent woman standing there in the road was 
his mother. They didn't keep a pig, but they 
kept a yellow cat, only he was lost now; he had 
gone away, and they didn't know where to find 
him. He went to school now — he walked all 
the way there by himself and all the way back 
every day. It was very hard at first, because 
the other boys laughed at and plagued him. 
Then they hit him, but he hit them back as hard 
as he could. After that they hurt him, but they 
couldn't make him cry. He never cried, and 
always hit them back, and now they were begin- 
ning to leave him alone. His father was named 
Mr. Job, and he worked at the farm, but he 
couldn't do so much work now because he was 
such an old man. Sometimes when he came 
home in the evening he sat in his chair and 
groaned as if it hurt him. And he had two sis- 
ters; one was Susan; she was married and had 
three big girls; and Jane was married too, but 
had no children. They lived a great way off. 
So did his brother. His name was Jim, and he 
was a great fat man and sometimes came from 



212 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

London, where he lived, to see them. He didn't 
know much about Jim; he was very silent, but 
not with mother. Those two would shut them- 
selves up together and talk and talk, but no one 
knew what they were talking about. He would 
write to mother too; but she would always hide 
the letters and say to father: ^'It's only from 
Jim; he says he's very well — that's all." But 
they were very long letters, so he must have said 
more than that. 

Thus he prattled, while I, to pay him for the 
southernwood, drew figures of the birds he knew 
best on the leaves I tore from my note-book and 
gave them to him. He thanked me very prettily 
and put them in his pocket. 

"And what is your name?" I asked. 

He drew himself up before me and in a 
clear voice, pronouncing the words in a slov/ 
measured manner, as if repeating a lesson, he 
answered: "Edmund Jasper Donisthorpe Stan- 
ley Overington." 

The name so astonished me that I remained 
silent for quite two minutes during which I re- 
peated it to myself many times to fix it in my 
memory. 



A SPRAY OF SOUTHERNWOOD 213 

''But why," said I at length, "do you call 
yourself Overington when your father's name is 
Job?" 

''Oh, that is because I have two fathers — Mr. 
Job, my very old father, and Mr. Overington, 
who lives away from here. He comes to see me 
sometimes, and he is my father too; but I have 
only one mother — there she is out again looking 
at us." 

I questioned him no further, and no further 
did I seek those mysteries to disclose, and so we 
parted; but I never see a plant or sprig of 
southernwood, nor inhale its cedarwood smell, 
which one does not know whether to like or dis- 
like, without recalling the memory of that 
miraculous cottage child with a queer history 
and numerous names. 



XXIV 
IN PORTCHESTER CHURCHYARD 

TO the historically and archaeologically 
minded the castle and walls at Portchester 
are of great importance. Romans, Britons, 
Saxons, Normans — they all made use of this 
well-defended place for long centuries, and it 
still stands, much of it well preserved, to be 
explored and admired by many thousands of 
visitors every year. What most interested me 
was the sight of two small boys playing in the 
churchyard. The village church, as at Silches- 
ter, is inside the old Roman walls, in a corner, 
the village itself being some distance away. 
After strolling round the churchyard I sat down 
on a stone under the walls and began watching 
the two boys — little fellows of the cottage clase 
from the village who had come, each with a pair 
of scissors, to trim the turf on two adjoining 
mounds. The bigger of the two, who was about 
ten years old, was very diligent and did his work 
neatly, trimming the grass evenly and giving the 

214 



IN PORTCHESTER CHURCHYARD 215 

mound a nice smooth appearance. The other 
boy was not so much absorbed in his work; he 
kept looking up and making jeering remarks 
and faces at the other, and at intervals his busy 
companion put down his shears and went for 
him with tremendous spirit. Then a chase 
among and over the graves would begin; finally, 
they would close, struggle, tumble over a mound 
and pommel one another with all their might. 
The struggle over, they would get up, shake off 
the dust and straws, and go back to their work. 
After a few minutes the youngest boy recovered 
from his punishment, and, getting tired of the 
monotony, would begin teasing again, and a 
fresh flight and battle would ensue. 

By-and-by, after witnessing several of these 
fights, I went down and sat on a mound next 
to theirs and entered into conversation with 
them. 

"Whose grave are you trimming?" I asked 
the elder boy. 

It was his sister's, he said, and when I asked 
him how long she had been dead, he answered, 
'^Twenty years." She had died more than ten 
years before he was born. He said there had 



2i6 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

been eight of them born, and he was the young- 
est of the lot; his eldest brother was married and 
had children five or six years old. Only one of 
the eight had died — this sister, when she was a 
little girl. Her name was Mary, and one day 
every week his mother sent him to trim the 
mound. He did not remember when it began — 
he must have been very small. He had to trim 
the grass, and in summer to water it so as to 
keep it always smooth and fresh and green. 

Before he had finished his story the other 
little fellow, who was not interested in it and 
was getting tired again, began in a low voice to 
mock at his companion, repeating his words 
after him. Then my little fellow, with a very 
serious, resolute air, put the scissors down, and 
in a moment they were both up and away, doub- 
ling this way and that, bounding over the 
mounds, like two young dogs at play, until, roll- 
ing over together, they fought again in the grass. 
There I left them and strolled away, thinking of 
the mother busy and cheerful in her cottage over 
there in the village, but always with that image 
of the little girl, dead these twenty years, in 
her heart. 



XXV 

HOMELESS 

ONE cold morning at Penzance I got into 
an omnibus at the station to travel to the 
small town of St. Just, six or seven miles away. 
Just before we started, a party of eight or ten 
queer-looking people came hurriedly up and 
climbed to the top seats. They were men and 
women, with two or three children, the women 
carelessly dressed, the men chalky-faced and 
long-haired, in ulsters of light colours and large 
patterns. When we had travelled two or three 
miles one of the outside passengers climbed 
down and came in to escape from the cold, 
and edged into a place opposite mine. He was 
a little boy of about seven or eight years old, 
and he had a small, quaint face with a tired ex- 
pression on it, and wore a soiled scarlet Turkish 
fez on his head, and a big pepper-and-salt over- 
coat heavily trimmed with old, ragged imita- 
tion astrachan. He was keenly alive to the sen- 

217 



2i8 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

sation his entrance created among us when the 
loud buzz of conversation ceased very suddenly 
and all eyes were fixed on him; but he bore it 
very, bravely, sitting back in his seat, rubbing 
his cold hands together, then burying them deep 
in his pockets and fixing his eyes on the roof. 
Soon the talk recommenced, and the little fel- 
low, wishing to feel more free, took his hands 
out and tried to unbutton his coat. The top 
button — a big horn button — resisted the efforts 
he made with his stiff little fingers, so I undid it 
for him and threw the coat open, disclosing a 
blue jersey striped with red, green velvet knick- 
erbockers, and black stockings, all soiled like 
the old scarlet flower-pot shaped cap. In his 
get-up he reminded me of a famous music- 
master and composer of my acquaintance, whose 
sense of harmony is very perfect with regard to 
sounds, but exceedingly crude as to colours. 
Imagine a big, long-haired man arrayed in a 
bottle-green coat, scarlet waistcoat, pink necktie, 
blue trousers, white hat, purple gloves and yel- 
low boots! If it were not for the fact that he 
wears his clothes a very long time and never has 
them brushed or the grease spots taken out, the 



HOMELESS 219 

effect would be almost painful. But he selects 
his colours, whereas the poor little boy probably 
had no choice in the matter. 

By-and-by the humorous gentleman who sat 
on either side of him began to play him little 
tricks, one snatching off his scarlet cap and the 
other blowing on his neck. He laughed a little, 
just to show that he didn't object to a bit of fun 
at his expense, but when the annoyance was con- 
tinued he put on a serious face, and folding up 
his cap thrust it into his overcoat pocket. He 
was not going to be made a butt of! 

'Where is your home?" I asked him. 

"I haven't got a home," he returned. 

"What, no home? Where was your home 
when you had one?" 

"I never had a home," he said. "I've always 
been travelling; but sometimes we stay a month 
in a place." Then, after an interval, he added: 
"I belong to a dramatic company." 

"And do you ever go on the stage to act?" I 
asked. 

"Yes," he returned, with a weary little sigh. 

Then our journey came to an end, and we 
saw the doors and windows of the St. Just Work- 



220 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

ing Men's Institute aflame with yellow placards 
announcing a series of sensational plays to be 
performed there. 

The queer-looking people came down and 
straggled off to the Institute, paying no atten- 
tion to the small boy. "Let me advise you," I 
said, standing over him on the pavement, "to 
treat yourself to a stiff tumbler of grog after 
your cold ride," and at the same time I put my 
hand in my pocket. 

He didn't smile, but at once held out his open 
hand. I put some pence in it, and clutching 
them he murmured "Thank you," and went 
after the others. 



XXVI 
THE STORY OF A SKULL 

A QUARTER of a century ago there were 
still to be seen in the outer suburbs of 
London many good old roomy houses, standing 
in their own ample and occasionally park-like 
grounds, which have now ceased to exist. They 
were old manor-houses, mostly of the Georgian 
period, some earlier, and some, too, were fine 
large farmhouses which a century or more ago 
had been turned into private residences of city 
merchants and other persons of means. Any 
middle-aged Londoner can recall a house or 
perhaps several houses of this description, and 
in one of those that were best known to me 1 
met with the skull, the story of which I wish to 
tell. 

It was a very old-looking, long, low red-brick 
building, with a verandah in front, and being 
well within the grounds, sheltered by old oak, 
elm, ash and beech trees, could hardly be seen 



222 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

from the road. The lawns and gardens were 
large, and behind them were two good-sized 
grass fields. Within the domain one had the 
feeling that he was far away in the country in 
one of its haunts of ancient peace, and yet all 
round it, outside of its old hedges and rows of 
elms, the ground had been built over, mostly 
with good-sized brick houses standing in their 
own gardens. It was a favourite suburb with 
well-to-do persons in the city, rents were high 
and the builders had long been coveting and 
trying to get possession of all this land which 
was "doing no good," in a district where haunts 
of ancients peace were distinctly out of place 
and not wanted. But the owner (aged ninety- 
eight) refused to sell. 

Not only the builders, but his own sons and 
sons' sons had represented to him that the rent 
he was getting for this property was nothing but 
an old song compared to what it would bring in, 
if he would let it on a long building lease. There 
was room there for thirty or forty good houses 
with big gardens. And his answer invariably 
was: "It shan't be touched! I was born in 
that house, and though I'm too old ever to go 



THE STORY OF A SKULL 223 

and see it again, it must not be pulled down — 
not a brick of it, not a tree cut, while I'm alive. 
' When I'm gone you can do what you like, be- 
cause then I shan't know what you are doing." 

My friends and relations, who were in occu- 
pation of the house, and loved it, hoped that he 
would go on living many, many years: but alas! 
the visit of the feared dark angel was to them 
and not to the old owner, who was perhaps "too 
old to die"; the dear lady of the house and its 
head was taken away and the family broken up, 
and from that day to this I have never ventured 
to revisit that sweet spot, nor sought to know 
what has been done to it. 

At that time it used to be my week-end home, 
and on one of my early visits I noticed the skull 
of an animal nailed to the wall about a yard 
above the stable door. It was too high to be 
properly seen without getting a ladder, and 
when the gardener told me that it was a bull- 
dog's skull, I thought no more about it. 

One day, several months later, I took a long 
look at it and got the idea that it was not a bull- 
dog's skull — that it was more like the skull of a 
human being of a very low type. I then asked 



2 24 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

my hostess to let me have it, and she said, ''Yes, 
certainly, take it if you want it." Then she 
added, "But what in the world do you want that 
horrid old skull for?" I said I wanted to find 
out what it was, and then she told me that it 
was a bulldog's skull — the gardener had told 
her. I replied that I did not think so, that it 
looked to me more like the skull of a cave-man 
who had inhabited those parts half a million 
years ago, perhaps. This speech troubled her 
very much, for she was a religious woman, and it 
pained her to hear unorthodox statements about 
the age of man on the earth. She said that I 
could not have the skull, that it was dreadful 
to her to hear me say it might be a human skull; 
that she would order the gardener to take it 
down and bury it somewhere in the grounds at 
a distance from the house. Until that was done 
she would not go near the stables — it would he 
like a nightmare to see that dreadful head on 
the wall. I said I would remove it imme- 
diately; it was mine, as she had given it to me, 
and it was not a man's skull at all — I was only 
joking, so that she need not have any qualms 
about it. 



THE STORY OF A SKULL 225 

That pacified her, and I took down the old 
skull, which looked more dreadful than ever 
when I climbed up to it, for though the dome 
of it was bleached white, the huge eye cavities 
and mouth were black and filled with old black 
mould and dead moss. Doubtless it had been 
very many years in that place, as the long nails 
used in fastening it there were eaten up with 
rust. 

When I got back to London the box with the 
skull in it was put away in my book-room, and 
rested there forgotten for two or three years. 
Then one day I was talking on natural history 
subjects to my publisher, and he told me that his 
son, just returned from Oxford, had developed 
a keen interest in osteology and was making a 
collection of mammalian skulls from the whale 
and elephant and hippopotamus to the harvest- 
mouse and lesser shrew. This reminded me of 
the long-forgotten skull, and I told him I had 
something to send him for his boy's collection, 
but before sending it I would find out what it 
was. Accordingly I sent the skull to Mr. Frank 
E. Beddard, the prosector of the Zoological So- 
ciety, asking him to tell me what it was. His 



226 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

reply was that it was the skull of an adult gor- 
illa — a fine large specimen. 

It was then sent on to the young collector of 
skulls — who will, alas! collect no more, having 
now given his life to his country. It saddened 
me a little to part with it, certainly not because 
it was a pretty object to possess, but only be- 
cause that bleached dome beneath which brains 
were once housed, and those huge black cavities 
which were once the windows of a strange soul, 
and that mouth that once had a fleshy tongue 
that youled and clicked in an unknown lan- 
guage could not tell me its own life-and-death 
history from the time of its birth in the African 
forest to its final translation to a wall over a 
stable door in an old house near London. 

There are now several writers on animals who 
are not exactly naturalists, not yet mere fiction- 
ists, but who, to a considerable knowledge of 
animal psychology and extraordinary sympathy 
with all wildness, unite an imaginative insight 
which reveals to them much of the inner, the 
mind life of brutes. No doubt the greatest of 
these is Charles Roberts, the Canadian, and I 



THE STORY OF A SKULL 227 

only wish it had been he who had discovered 
the old gorilla skull above the stable door, and 
that the incident had fired the creative brain 
which gave us Red Fox and many another won- 
derful biography. 

Now here is an odd coincidence. After writ- 
ing the skull story it came into my head to relate 
it to a lady I was dining with, and I also told 
her of my intention of putting it in this book of 
Little Things. She said it was funny that she 
too had a story of a skull which she had thought 
of telling in her volume of Little Things; but 
no, she would not venture to do so, although it 
was a better story than mine. 

She was good enough to let me hear it, and 
as it is not to appear elsewhere I can't resist the 
temptation of bringing it in here. 

On her return to Europe after travelling and 
residing for some years in the Far East, she 
established herself in Paris and proceeded to 
decorate her apartment with some of the won- 
derful rich and rare objects she had collected 
in outlandish parts. Gorgeous fabrics, embroi- 
deries, pottery, metal and woodwork, and along 



228 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

with these products of an ancient civilisation, 
others of rude or primitive tribes, quaint head- 
gear and plumes, strings and ropes of beads, 
worn as garments by people who run wild in 
woods, with arrows, spears and other weapons. 
These last were arranged in the form of a wheel 
over the entrance, with the bleached and pol- 
ished skull of an orang-utan in the centre. It 
was a very perfect skull, with all the formidable 
teeth intact and highly effective. 

She lived happily for some months in her 
apartment and was very popular in Parisian so- 
ciety and visited by many distinguished people, 
who all greatly admired her Eastern decora- 
tions, especially the skull, before which they 
would stand expressing their delight with fer- 
vent exclamations. 

One day when on a visit at a friend's house, 
her host brought up a gentleman who wished to 
be introduced to her. He made himself ex- 
tremely agreeable, but was a little too effusive 
with his complimentary speeches, telling her 
how delighted he was to meet her, and how 
much he had been wishing for that honour. 

After hearing this two or three times she 



THE STORY OF A SKULL 229 

turned on him and asked him in the directest 
way why he had wished to see her so very much ; 
then, anticipating that the answer would be that 
it was because of what he had heard of her 
charm, her linguistic, musical and various other 
accomplishments, and so on, she made ready to 
administer a nice little snub, when he made this 
very unexpected reply: 

^'O madame, how can you ask? You must 
know we all admire you because you are the 
only person in all Paris who has the courage 
and originality to decorate her salon with a hu- 
man skull." 



XXVII 
A STORY OF A WALNUT 

HE was a small old man, curious to look at, 
and every day when I came out of my 
cottage and passed his garden he was there, his 
crutches under his arms, leaning on the gate, 
silently regarding me as I went by. Not boldly; 
his round dark eyes were like those of some shy 
animal peering inquisitively but shyly at the 
passer-by. His was a tumble-down old thatched 
cottage, leaky and miserable to live in, with 
about three-quarters of an acre of mixed garden 
and orchard surrounding it. The trees were of 
several kinds — cherry, apple, pear, plum, and 
one big walnut; and there were also shade trees, 
some shrubs and currant and gooseberry bushes, 
mixed with vegetables, herbs, and garden 
flowers. The man himself was in harmony with 
his disorderly but picturesque surroundings, his 
clothes dirty and almost in rags; an old jersey in 
place of a shirt, and over it two and sometimes 

230 



A STORY OF A WALNUT 231 

three waistcoats of different shapes and sizes, all 
of one indeterminate earthy colour; and over 
these an ancient coat too big for the wearer. The 
thin hair, worn on the shoulders, was dust-colour 
mixed with grey, and to crown all there was a 
rusty rimless hat, shaped like an inverted flower- 
pot. From beneath this strange hat the small 
strange face, with the round, furtive, troubled 
eyes, watched me as I passed. 

The people I lodged with told me his history. 
He had lived there many years, and everybody 
knew him, but nobody liked him, — a cunning, 
foxy, grabbing old rascal; unsocial, suspicious, 
unutterably mean. Never in all the years of his 
life in the village had he given a sixpence or a 
penny to anyone; nor a cabbage, nor an apple, 
nor had he ever lent a helping hand to a neigh- 
bour nor shown any neighbourly feeling. 

He had lived for himself alone; and was alone 
in the world, in his miserable cottage, and no 
person had any pity for him in his loneliness 
and suffering now when he was almost disabled 
by rheumatism. 

He was not a native of the village; he had 
come to it a young man, and some kindly-dis- 



232 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

posed person had allowed him to build a small 
hut as a shelter at the side of his hedge. Now 
the village was at one end of a straggling com- 
mon, and many irregular strips and patches of 
common-land existed scattered about among the 
cottages and orchards. It was at a hedge-side 
on the border of one of these isolated patches 
that the young stranger, known as an inoffensive, 
diligent, and exceedingly quiet young man, set 
up his hovel. To protect it from the cattle he 
made a small ditch before it. This ditch he 
made very deep, and the earth thrown out he 
built into a kind of rampart, and by its outer 
edge he put a row of young holly plants, which 
a good-natured woodman made him a present 
of. He was advised to plant the holly behind 
the ditch, but he thought his plan the best, and 
to protect the young plants he made a little fence 
of odd sticks and bits of old wire and hoop iron. 
But the sheep would get in, so he made a new 
ditch; and then something else, until in the 
course of years the three-quarters of an acre had 
been appropriated. That was the whole history, 
and the pilfering had gone no further only be- 
cause someone in authority had discovered and 



A STORY OF A WALNUT 233 

put a stop to it. Still, one could see that (in 
spite of the powers) a strip a few inches in 
breadth was being added annually to the estate. 

I was so much interested in all this that from 
time to time I began to pause beside his gate 
to converse with him. By degrees the timid, sus- 
picious expression wore away, and his eyes 
looked only wistful, and he spoke of his aches 
and pains as if it did him good to tell them to 
another. 

I then left the village, but visited it from time 
to time, usually at intervals of some months, al- 
ways to find him by his gate, on his own prop- 
erty, which he won for himself in the middle of 
the village, and from which he watched his 
neighbours moving about their cottages, going 
and coming, and was not of them. Then a whole 
year went by, and when I found him at the old 
gate in the old attitude, with the old wistful look 
in the eyes, he seemed glad to see me, and we 
talked of many things. We talked, that is, of 
the weather, with reference to the crops, and his 
rheumatism. What else in the world was there 
to talk of? He read no paper and heard no 
news and was of no politics; and if it can be 



234 A TRAVELLER TN LITTLE THINGS 

said that he had a philosophy of life it was a 
low-down one, about on a level with that of a 
solitary old dog-badger who lives in an earth he 
has excavated for himself with infinite pains in a 
strong stubborn soil — his home and refuge in a 
hostile world. 

Finally, casting about in my mind for some 
new subject of conversation — for I was reluctant 
to leave him soon after so long an absence — it 
occurred to me that we had not said anything 
about his one walnut tree. Of all the other trees 
and the fruit he had gathered from them he had 
already spoken. "By-the-way," I said, "did your 
walnut tree yield well this year?" 

"Yes, very well," he returned; then he 
checked himself and said, "Pretty well, but I 
did not get much for them." And after a little 
hesitation he added, "That reminds me of some- 
thing I had forgotten. Something I have been 
keeping for you — a little present." 

He began to feel in the capacious pockets of 
his big outside waistcoat, but found nothing. "I 
must give it up," he said; "I must have mislaid 
it." 

He seemed a little relieved, and at the same 
time a little disappointed; and by-and-by, on my 



A STORY OF A WALNUT 235 

remarking that he had not felt in all his pockets, 
began searching again, and in the end produced 
the lost something — a walnut! Holding it up a 
moment, he presented it to me with a little for- 
ward jerk of the hand and a little inclination of 
the head; and that little gesture, so unexpected 
in him, served to show that he had thought a 
good deal about giving the walnut away, and 
had looked on it as rather an important present. 
It was, perhaps, the only one he had ever made 
in his life. While giving it to me he said very 
nicely, "Pray make use of it." 

The use I have made of it is to put it care- 
fully away among other treasured objects, 
picked up at odd times in out-of-the-way places. 
It may be that some minute mysterious insect 
or infinitesimal mite — there is almost certain to 
be a special walnut mite — has found an entrance 
into this prized nut and fed on its oily meat, re- 
ducing it within to a rust-coloured powder. 
The grub or mite, or whatever it is, may do so 
at its pleasure, and flourish and grow fat, and 
rear a numerous family, and get them out if it 
can; but all these corroding processes and 
changes going on inside the shell do not in the 
least diminish my nut's intrinsic value. 



XXVII 

A STORY OF A JACKDAW 

AT one end of the Wiltshire village where I 
-*- ^ was staying there was a group of half-a- 
dozen cottages surrounded by gardens and shade 
trees, and every time I passed this spot on my 
way to and from the downs on that side, I was 
hailed by a loud challenging cry — a sort of 
"Hullo, who goes there!" Unmistakably the 
voice of a jackdaw, a pet bird no doubt, friendly 
and impudent as one always expects Jackie to 
be. And as I always like to learn the history 
of every pet daw I come across, I went down to 
the cottage the cry usually came from to make 
enquiries. The door was opened to me by a 
tall, colourless, depressed-looking woman, who 
said in reply to my question that she didn't own 
no jackdaw. There was such a bird there, but 
it was her husband's and she didn't know noth- 
ing about it. I couldn't see it because it had 
flown away somewhere and wouldn't be back 
for a long time. I could ask her husband about 

236 



A STORY OF A JACKDAW 237 

it; he was the village sweep, and also had a car- 
penter's shop. 

I did not venture to cross-question her; but 
the history of the daw came to me soon enough 
— on the evening of the same day in fact. I was 
staying at the inn and had already become aware 
that the bar-parlour was the customary meeting- 
place of a majority of the men in that small 
isolated centre of humanity. There was no club 
nor institute or reading-room, nor squire or 
other predominant person to regulate things dif- 
ferently. The landlord, wise in his generation, 
provided newspapers liberally as well as beer, 
and had his reward. The people who gathered 
there of an evening included two or three 
farmers, a couple of professional gentlemen — 
not the vicar; a man of property, the postman, 
the carrier, the butcher, the baker and other 
tradesmen, the farm and other labourers, and 
last, but not least, the village sweep. A curious 
democratic assembly to be met with in a rural 
village in a purely agricultural district, ex- 
tremely conservative in politics. 

I had already made the acquaintance of some 
of the people, high and low, and on that evening. 



238 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS \ 

hearing much hilarious talk in the parlour, I 
went in to join the company, and found fifteen 
or twenty persons present. The conversation, 
when I found a seat, had subsided into a quiet 
tone, but presently the door opened and a short, 
robust-looking man with a round, florid, smiling 
face looked in upon us. 

"Hullo, Jimmy, what makes you so late?" 
said someone in the room. "We're waiting to 
hear the finish of all that trouble about your bird 
at home. Stolen any more of your wife's jewel- 
lery? Come in, and let's hear all about it." 

"Oh, give him time," said another. "Can't 
you see his brain's busy inventing something 
new to tell us!" 

"Inventing, you say!" exclaimed Jimmy, with 
affected anger. "There's no need to do that! 
That there bird does tricks nobody would think 
of." 

Here the person sitting next to me, speaking 
low, informed me that this was Jimmy Jacob, 
the sweep, that he owned a pet jackdaw, known 
to every one in the village, and supposed to be 
the cleverest bird that ever was. He added that 
Jimmy could be very amusing about his bird. 



A STORY OF A JACKDAW 239 

"I'd already begup to feel curious about that 
bird of yours," I said, addressing the sweep. 
''I'd like very much to hear his history. Did 
you take him from the nest?" 

"Yes, Jim," said the man next to me. "Tell 
us how you came by the bird; it's sure to be a 
good story." 

Jimmy, having found a seat and had a mug of 
beer put before him, began by remarking that he 
knew someone had been interesting himself in 
that bird of his. "When I went home to tea 
this afternoon," he continued, "my missus, she 
says to me: 'There's that bird of yours again,' 
she says." 

" 'What bird,' says I. 'If you mean Jac,' says 
I, 'what's he done now? — out with it.' 

" 'We'll talk about what he's done bimeby,' 
says she. 'What I mean is, a gentleman called 
to ask about that bird.' 

" 'Oh, did he?' says I. 'Yes,' she says. 'I told 
him I didn't know nothing about it. He could 
go and ask you. You'd be sure to tell him a lot.' 

" 'And what did the gentleman say to that?' 
says I. 

" 'He arsked me who you was, an' I said you 



240 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

was the sweep an' you had a carpenter's shop 
near the pub, and was supposed to do carpen- 
tering.' 

^^ Supposed to do carpentering! That's how 
she said it. 

" 'And what did the gentleman say to that?' 
says I. 

" 'He said he thought he seen you at the inn, 
and I said that's just where he would see you.' 

" 'Anything more between you and the gentle- 
man?' says I, and she said: 'No, nothing more 
except that he said he'd look you up and arst if 
you was a funny little fat man, sort of round, 
with a little red face. And I said "Yes, that's 
him." ' " 

Here I thought it time to break in. "It's true," 
I said, "I called at your cottage and saw your 
wife, but there's no truth in the account you've 
given of the conversation I had with her." 

There was a general laugh. "Oh, very well," 
said Jimmy. "After that I've nothing more to 
say about the bird or anything else." 

I replied that I was sorry, but we need not 
begin our acquaintance by quarrelling — that it 
would be better to have a drink together. 



A STORY OF A JACKDAW 241 

Jimmy smiled consent, and I called for an- 
other pint for Jimmy and a soda for myself; 
then added I was so sorry he had taken it that 
way as I should have liked to hear how he got 
his bird. 

He answered that if I put it that way he 
wouldn't mind telling me. And everybody was 
pleased, and composed ourselves once more to 
listen. 

"How I got that there bird was like this," he 
began. "It were about half after four in the 
morning, summer before last, an' I was just hav- 
ing what I may call my beauty sleep, when all 
of a sudding there came a most thundering rat-a- 
tat-tat at the door. 

" 'Good Lord,' says my missus, 'whatever is 
that?' 

" 'Sounds like a knock at the door,' says I. 
'Just slip on your thingamy an' go see.' 

" 'No,' she says, 'you must go, it might be a 
man.' 

" 'No,' I says, 'it ain't nothing of such conse- 
kince as that. It's only an old woman come to 
borrow some castor oil.' 

"So she went and bime-by comes back and 



242 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

says : 'It's a man that's called to see you an' it's 
very important.' 

" 'Tell him I'm in bed,' says I, 'and can't get 
up till six o'clock.' 

"Well, after a lot of grumbling, she went 
again, then came back and says the man won't 
go away till he seen me, as it's very important. 
'Something about a bird,' she says. 

"'A bird!' I says, 'what d'you mean by a 
bird?' 

" 'A rook!' she says. 

" 'A rook!' says I. 'Is he a madman, or what?' 

" 'He's a man at the door,' she says, 'an' he 
won't go away till he sees you, so you'd better 
git up and see him.' 

" 'AH right, old woman,' I says, 'I'll git up 
as you say I must, and I'll smash him. Get me 
something to put on,' I says. 

"'No,' she says, 'don't smash him'; and she 
give me something to put on, weskit and 
trousers, so I put on the weskit and got one foot 
in a slipper, and went out to him with the 
trousers in my hand. And there he was at the 
door, sure enough, a tramp! 

" 'Now, my man,' says I, very severe-like, 



A STORY OF A JACKDAW 243 

'what's this something important you've got me 
out of bed at four of the morning for? Is it the 
end of the world, or what?' 

''He looked at me quite calm and said it 
was something important but not that — not the 
end of the world. 'I'm sorry to disturb you,' he 
says, 'but women don't understand things prop- 
erly,' he says, 'an' I always think it best to speak 
to a man.' 

" 'That's all very well,' I says, 'but how long 
do you intend to keep me here with nothing but 
this on?' 

" 'I'm just coming to it,' he says, not a bit put 
out. 'It's like this,' he says. 'I'm from the north 
— Newcastle way — an' on my way to Dor- 
chester, looking for work,' he says. 

" 'Yes, I see you are!' says I, looking him up 
and down, fierce-like. 

" 'Last evening,' he says, 'I come to a wood 
about a mile from this 'ere village, and I says to 
myself, "I'll stay here and go on in the morn- 
ing." So I began looking about and found some 
fern and cut an armful and made a bed under 
a oak-tree. I slep' there till about three this 
morning. When I opened my eyes, what should 



244 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

I see but a bird sitting on the ground close to 
me? I no sooner see it than I says to myself, 
"That bird is as good as a breakfast," I says. So 
I just put out my hand and copped it. And here 
it is!' And out he pulled a bird from under his 
coat. 

" That's a young jackdaw,' I says. 

" 'You may call it a jackdaw if you like,' says 
he; 'but what I want you to understand is that 
it ain't no ornary bird. It's a bird,' he says, 
'that'll do you hansom and you'll be proud to 
have, and I've called here to make you a present 
of it. All I want is a bit of bread, a pinch of 
tea, and some sugar to make my breakfast in an 
hour's time when I git to some cottage by the 
road where they got a fire lighted,' he says. 

"When he said that, I burst out laughing, a 
foolish thing to do, mark you, for when you 
laugh, you're done for; but I couldn't help it 
for the life of me. I'd seen many tramps but 
never such a cool one as this. 

"I no sooner laughed than he put the bird in 
my hands, and I had to take it. 'Good Lord!' 
says I. Then I called to the missus to fetch me 
the loaf and a knife, and when I got it I cut him 



A STORY OF A JACKDAW 245 

ofi half the loaf. 'Don't give him that,' she says : 
'I'll cut him a piece.' But all I says was, 'Go 
and git me the tea.' 

" 'There's a very little for breakfast,' she says. 
But I made her fetch the caddy, and he put out 
his hand and I half filled it with tea. 'Isn't that 
enough?' says I; 'well, then, have some more,' I 
says; and he had some more. Then I made her 
fetch the bacon and began cutting him rashers. 
'One's enough,' says the old woman. 'No,' says 
I, 'let him have a good breakfast. The bird's 
worth it,' says I and went on cutting him bacon. 
'Anything more?' I arst him. 

" 'If you've a copper or two to spare,' he says, 
'it'll be a help to me on my way to Dor- 
chester.' 

" 'Certainly,' says I, and I began to feel in my 
trouser pockets and found a florin. 'Here,' I 
says, 'it's all I have, but you're more than wel- 
come to it.' 

"Then my missus she giv' a sort of snort, and 
walked off. 

" 'And now,' says I, 'per'aps you won't mind 
letting me go back to git some clothes on.' 

"In one minute,' he says, and went on calmly 



246 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Stowing the things away, and when he finished, 
he looks at me quite serious, and says, 'I'm 
obliged to you,' he says, 'and I hope you haven't 
ketched cold standing with your feet on them 
bricks and nothing much on you,' he says. 'But 
I want most particular to arst you not to forget 
to remember about that bird I giv' you,' he says. 
'You call it a jackdaw, and I've no particular 
objection to that, only don't go and run away 
with the idea that it's just an or'nary jackdaw. 
It's a different sort, and you'll come to know its 
value bime-by, and that it ain't the kind of bird 
you can buy with a bit of bread and a pinch of 
tea,' he says. 'And there's something else you've 
got to think of — that wife of yours. I've been 
sort of married myself and can feel for you,' he 
says. 'The time will come when that there 
bird's pretty little ways will amuse her, and last 
of all it'll make her smile, and you'll get the 
benefit of that,' he says. 'And you'll remember 
the bird was giv' to you by a man named Jones — 
that's my name, Jones — ^walking from New- 
castle to Dorchester, looking for work. A poor 
man, you'll say, down on his luck, but not one 
of the common sort, not a greedy, selfish man, 



A STORY OF A JACKDAW 247 

but a man that's always trying to do something 
to make others happy,' he says. 

"And after that, he said, 'Good-bye,' without 
a smile, and walked off. 

"And there at the door I stood, I don't know 
how long, looking after him going down the 
road. Then I laughed; I don't know that I ever 
laughed so much in my life, and at last I had to 
sit down on the bricks to go on laughing more 
comfortably, until the missus came and arst me, 
sarcastic-like, if I'd got the high-strikes, and if 
she'd better get a bucket of water to throw over 
me. 

"I says, 'No, I don't want no water. Just let 
me have my laugh out and then it'll be all right.' 
Well, I don't see nothing to laugh at,' she says. 
'And I s'pose you thought you giv' him a penny. 
Well, it wasn't a penny, it was a florin,' she says. 

" 'And little enough, too,' I says. What that 
man said to me, to say nothing of the bird, was 
worth a sovereign. But you are a woman, and 
can't understand that,' I says. 'No,' she says, 'I 
can't, and lucky for you, or we'd 'a' been in the 
workhouse before now,' she says. 

"And that's how I got the bird." 



XXIX 

A WONDERFUL STORY OF A 
MACKEREL 

THE angler is a mighty spinner of yarns, but 
no sooner does he set about the telling than 
I, knowing him of old, and accounting him not 
an uncommon but an unconscionable liar, begin 
(as Bacon hath it) ''to droop and languish." 
Nor does the languishing end with the story if 
I am compelled to sit it out, for in that state I 
continue for some hours after. But oh! the dif- 
ference when someone who is not an angler re- 
lates a fishing adventure! A plain truthful man 
who never dined at an anglers' club, nor knows 
that he who catches, or tries to catch a fish, must 
tell you something to astonish and fill you with 
envy and admiration. To a person of this de- 
scription I am all attention, and however pro- 
saic and even dull the narrative may be, it fills 
me with delight, and sends me happy to bed 
and (still chuckling) to a refreshing sleep. 
Accordingly, when one of the "commercials" 
248 



A WONDERFUL STORY OF A MACKEREL 249 

in the coffee-room of the Plymouth Hotel began 
to tell a wonderful story of a mackerel he once 
caught a very long time back, I immediately put 
down my pen so as to listen with all my ears. 
For he was about the last person one would 
have thought of associating with fish-catching — 
an exceedingly towny-looking person indeed, 
one who from his conversation appeared to 
know nothing outside of his business. He was 
past middle age — oldish-looking for a traveller 
— his iron-grey hair brushed well up to hide the 
baldness on top, disclosing a pair of large ears 
which stood out like handles; a hatchet face 
with parchment skin, antique side whiskers, and 
gold-rimmed glasses on his large beaky nose. He 
wore the whitest linen and blackest, glossiest 
broadcloth, a big black cravat, diamond stud in 
his shirt-front in the old fashion, and a heavy 
gold chain with a spade guinea attached. His 
get-up and general appearance, though ancient, 
or at all events mid-Victorian, proclaimed him 
a person of considerable importance in his voca- 
tion. 

He had, he told us at starting, a very good 
customer at Bristol, perhaps the best he ever 



250 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

had, at any rate the one who had stuck longest to 
him, since what he was telling us happened 
about the year 1870. He went to Bristol ex- 
pressly to see this man, expecting to get a good 
order from him, but when he arrived and saw 
the wife, and asked for her husband, she replied 
that he was away on his holiday with the two 
little boys. It was a great disappointment, for, 
of course, he couldn't get an order from her. 
Confound the woman! she was always against 
him; what she would have liked was to have 
half a dozen travellers dangling about her, so 
as to pit one against another and distribute the 
orders among them just as flirty females distrib- 
ute their smiles, instead of putting trust in one. 

Where had her husband gone for his holiday? 
he asked; she said Weymouth and then was 
sorry she had let it out. But she refused to give 
the address. "No, no," she said; "he's gone to 
enjoy himself, and mustn't be reminded of busi- 
ness till he gets back." 

However, he resolved to follow him to Wey- 
mouth on the chance of finding him there, and 
accordingly took the next train to that place. 
And, he added, it was lucky for him that he did 



A WONDERFUL STORY OF A MACKEREL 251 

SO, for he very soon found him with his boys on 
the front, and, in spite of what she said, it was 
not with this man as it was with so many others 
who refuse to do business when away from the 
shop. On the contrary, at Weymouth he se- 
cured the best order this man had given him up 
to that time; and it was because he was away 
from his wife, who had always contrived to be 
present at their business meetings, and was very 
interfering, and made her husband too cautious 
in buying. 

It was early in the day when this business was 
finished. "And now," said the man from Bris- 
tol, who was in a sort of gay holiday mood, 
"what are you going to do with yourself for the 
rest of the day?" 

He answered that he was going to take the 
next train back to London. He had finished 
with Weymouth — there was no other customer 
there. 

Here he digressed to tell us that he was a be- 
ginner at that time at the salary of a pound a 
week and fifteen shillings a day for travelling 
expenses. He thought this a great thing at first; 
when he heard what he was to get he walked 



252 A TRAVFXLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

about on air all day long, repeating to himself, 
"Fifteen shillings a day for expenses!" It was 
incredible; he had been poor, earning about five 
shillings a week, and now he had suddenly come 
into this splendid fortune. It wouldn't be much 
for him now! He began by spending reck- 
lessly; and in a short time discovered that the 
fifteen shillings didn't go far; now he had come 
to his senses and had to practise a rigid economy. 
Accordingly, he thought he would save the cost 
of a night's lodging and go back to town. But 
the Bristol man was anxious to keep him and 
said he had hired a man and boat to go fishing 
with the boys, — why couldn't he just engage a 
bedroom for the night and spend the afternoon 
with them? 

After some demur he consented, and took his 
bag to a modest Temperance Hotel, where he se- 
cured a room, and then, protesting he had never 
caught a fish or seen one caught in his life, he 
got into the boat, and was taken into the bay 
where he was to have his first and only experi- 
ence of fishing. Perhaps it was no great thing, 
but it gave him something to remember all his 
life. 



A WONDERFUL STORY OF A MACKEREL 253 

After a while his line began to tremble and 
move about in an extraordinary way with sud- 
den little tugs which were quite startling, and on 
pulling it in he found he had a mackerel on his 
hook. He managed to get it into the boat all 
right and was delighted at his good luck, and 
still more at the sight of the fish, shining like 
silver and showing the most beautiful colours. 
He had never seen anything so beautiful in his 
life! Later, the same thing happened again 
with the line and a second mackerel was caught, 
and altogether he caught three. His friend also 
caught a few, and after a most pleasant and ex- 
citing afternoon they returned to the town well 
pleased with their sport. His friend wanted him 
to take a share of the catch, and after a little 
persuasion he consented to take one, and he 
selected the one he had caught first, just because 
it was the first fish he had ever caught in his life, 
and it had looked more beautiful than any other, 
so would probably taste better. 

Going back to the hotel he called the maid 
and told her he had brought in a mackerel which 
he had caught for his tea, and ordered her to 
have it prepared. He had it boiled and enjoyed 



254 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

it very much, but on the following morning 
when the bill was brought to him he found that 
he had been charged two shillings for fish. 

'Why, what does this item mean?" he ex- 
claimed. "I've had no fish in this hotel except 
a mackerel which I caught myself and brought 
back for my tea, and now I'm asked to pay two 
shillings for it? Just take the bill back to your 
mistress and tell her the fish was mine — I caught 
it myself in the Bay yesterday afternoon." 

The girl took it up, and by-and-by returned 
and said her mistress had consented to take 
threepence off the bill as he had provided the 
fish himself. 

"No," he said, indignantly, "I'll have nothing 
off the bill, I'll pay the full amount," and pay 
it he did in his anger, then went off to say good- 
bye to his friend, to whom he related the case. 

His friend, being in the same hilarious 
humour as on the previous day, burst out laugh- 
ing and made a good deal of fun over the mat- 
ter. 

That, he said, was the whole story of how he 
went fishing and caught a mackerel, and what 
came of it. But it was not quite all, for he went 



A WONDERFUL STORY OF A MACKEREL 255 

on to tell us that he still visited Bristol regularly 
to receive big and ever bigger orders from that 
same old customer of his, whose business had 
gone on increasing ever since; and invariably 
after finishing their business his friend remarks 
in a casual sort of way: "By the way, old man, 
do you remember that mackerel you caught at 
Weymouth which you had for tea, and were 
charged two shillings for?" "Then he laughs 
just as heartily as if it had only happened yes- 
terday, and I leave him in a good humour, and 
say to myself: 'Now, I'll hear no more about 
that blessed mackerel till I go round to Bristol 
again in three months' time.' " 

"How long ago did you say it was since you 
caught the mackerel?" I inquired. 

"About forty years." 

"Then," I said, "it was a very lucky fish for 
you — worth more perhaps than if a big diamond 
had been found in its belly. The man had got 
his joke — the one joke of his life perhaps — and 
was determined to stick to it, and that kept him 
faithful to you in spite of his wife's wish to dis- 
tribute their orders among a lot of travellers." 

He replied that I was perhaps right and that 



2S6 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

it had turned out a lucky fish for him. But his 
old customer, though his business was big, was 
not so important to him now when he had big 
customers in most of the large towns in Eng- 
land, and he thought it rather ridiculous to keep 
up that joke so many years. 



XXX 

STRANGERS YET 

THE man who composed that familiar de- 
lightful rhyme about blue eyes and black, 
and how you are to beware of the hidden knife 
in the one case and of a different sort of danger 
which may threaten you in the other, must have 
lived a good long time ago, or else be a very 
old man. Oh, so old, thousands of years, thou- 
sands of years, if all were told. And he, when 
he exhibited such impartiality, must have had 
other-coloured eyes himself. Most probably 
the sheep and goat eye, one which no person in 
his senses — except an anthropologist — can clas- 
sify as either dark or light. It is that marma- 
lade yellow, excessively rare in this country, but 
not very uncommon in persons of Spanish race. 
For who at this day, this age, after the mixing 
together of the hostile races has been going on 
these twenty centuries or longer, can believe that 
any inherited or instinctive animosity can still 

257 



258 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

survive? If we do find such a feeling here and 
there, would it not be more reasonable to regard 
it as an individual antipathy, or as a prejudice, 
imbibed early in life from parents or others, 
which endures in spite of reason, long after its 
origin had been forgotten? 

Nevertheless, one does meet with cases from 
time to time which do throw a slight shadow of 
doubt on the mind, and of several I have met 
I will here relate one. 

At an hotel on the South Coast I met a Miss 
Browne, which is not her name, and I rather 
hope this sketch will not be read by anyone 
nearly related to her, as they might identify her 
from the description. A middle-aged lady with 
a brown skin, black hair and dark eyes, an oval 
face, fairly good-looking, her manner lively and 
attractive, her movements quick without being 
abrupt or jerky. She was highly intelligent and 
a good talker, with more to say than most 
women, and better able than most to express 
herself. We were at the same small table and 
got on well together, as I am a good listener and 
she knew — being a woman, how should she not? 
• — that she interested me. 



STRANGERS YET 259 

One day at our table the conversation hap- 
pened to be about the races of men and the per- 
sistence of racial characteristics, physical and 
mental, in persons of mixed descent. The sub- 
ject interested her. "What would you call me?" 
she asked. 

"An Iberian," I returned. 

She laughed and said: "This makes the third 
time I have been called an Iberian, so perhaps 
it is true, and I'm curious to know what an 
Iberian is, and why I'm called an Iberian. Is 
it because I have something of a Spanish look?" 

I answered that the Iberians were the ancient 
Britons, a dark-eyed, brown-skinned people who 
inhabited this country and all Southern Europe 
before the invasion of the blue-eyed races; that 
doubtless there had been an Iberian mixture in 
her ancestors, perhaps many centuries ago, and 
that these peculiar characters had come out 
strongly in her; she had the peculiar kind of 
blood in her veins and the peculiar sort of soul 
which goes with the blood. 

"But what a mystery it is!" she exclaimed. 
"I am the only small one in a family of tall 
sisters. My parents were both tall and light. 



26o A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

and the others took after them. I was small 
and dark, and they were tall blondes with blue 
eyes and pale gold hair. And in disposition I 
was unlike them as in physique. How do you 
account for it?" 

It was a long question, I said, and I had told 
her all I could about it. I couldn't go further 
into it; I was too ignorant. I had just touched 
on the subject in one of my books. It was in 
other books, with reference to a supposed an- 
tagonism which still survives in blue-eyed and 
dark-eyed people. 

She asked me to give her the titles of the 
books I spoke of. "You imagine, I daresay," 
she said, "that it is mere idle curiosity on my 
part. It isn't so. The subject has a deep and 
painful interest for me." 

That was all, and I had forgotten all about the 
conversation until some time afterwards, when 
I had a letter from her recalling it. I quote 
one passage without the alteration of a syllable : 

"Oh, why did I not know before, when I was 
young, in the days when my beautiful blue-eyed 
but cruel and remorseless mother and sisters 
made my life an inexplicable grief and torment! 



STRANGERS YET 261 

It might have lifted the black shadows from 
my youth by explaining the reason of their per- 
secutions — it might have taken the edge from 
my sufferings by showing that I was not person- 
ally to blame, also that nothing could ever ob- 
viate it, that I but wasted my life and broke 
my heart in for ever vain efforts to appease an 
hereditary enemy and oppressor." 

Cases of this kind cannot, however, appear 
conclusive. The cases in which mother and 
daughters unite in persecuting a member of the 
family are not uncommon. I have known sev- 
eral in my experience in which respectable, 
well-to-do, educated, religious people have dis- 
played a perfectly fiendish animosity against 
one of the family. In all these cases it has been 
mother and daughters combining against one 
daughter, and so far as one can see into the mat- 
ter, the cause is usually to be traced to some 
strangeness or marked peculiarity, physical or 
mental, in the persecuted one. The peculiarity 
may be a beauty of disposition, or some virtue 
or rare mental quality which the others do not 
possess. 

It would perhaps be worth while to form a 



262 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

society to investigate all these cases of persecu- 
tion in families, to discover whether or not they 
afford any support to the notion of an inherited 
antagonism of dark and light races. The An- 
thropological, Eugenic and Psychical Research 
Societies might consider the suggestion. 



XXXI 

THE RETURN OF THE CHIFF-CHAFF 

(spring sadness) 

ON a warm, brilliant morning in late April 
I paid a visit to a shallow lakelet or pond 
five or six acres in extent which I had discov- 
ered some weeks before hidden in a depression 
in the land, among luxuriant furze, bramble, 
and blackthorn bushes. Between the thickets 
the boggy ground was everywhere covered with 
great tussocks of last year's dead and faded 
marsh grass — a wet, rough, lonely place where 
a lover of solitude need have no fear of being 
intruded on by a being of his own species, or 
even a wandering moorland donkey. On arriv- 
ing at the pond I was surprised and delighted 
to find half the surface covered with a thick 
growth of bog-bean just coming into flower. 
The quaint three-lobed leaves, shaped like a 
grebe's foot, were still small, and the flower- 

263 



264 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Stocks, thick as corn in a field, were crowned 
with pyramids of buds, cream and rosy-red like 
the opening dropwort clusters, and at the lower 
end of the spikes were the full-blown singular, 
snow-white, cottony flowers — our strange and 
beautiful water edelweiss. 

A group of ancient, gnarled and twisted alder 
bushes, with trunks like trees, grew just on the 
margin of the pond, and by-and-by I found a 
comfortable arm-chair on the lower stout hori- 
zontal branches overhanging the water, and on 
that seat I rested for a long time, enjoying the 
sight of that rare unexpected loveliness. 

The chiff-chaff, the common warbler of this 
moorland district, was now abundant, more so 
than anywhere else in England; two or three 
were flitting about among the alder leaves 
within a few feet of my head, and a dozen at 
least were singing within hearing, chiff-chaffing 
near and far, their notes sounding strangely loud 
at that still, sequestered spot. Listening to that 
insistent sound I was reminded of Warde Fowl- 
er's words about the sweet season which brings 
new life and hope to men, and how a seal and 
sanction is put on it by that same small bird's 



THE RETURN OF THE CmFF-CHAFF 265 

clear resonant voice. I endeavoured to recall 
the passage, saying to myself that in order to 
enter fully into the feeling expressed it is some- 
times essential to know an author's exact words. 
Failing in this, I listened again to the bird, then 
let my eyes rest on the expanse of red and cream- 
coloured spikes before me, then on the masses 
of flame-yellow furze beyond, then on some- 
thing else. I was endeavouring to keep my at- 
tention on these extraneous things, to shut my 
mind resolutely against a thought, intolerably 
sad, which had surprised me in that quiet soli- 
tary place. Surely, I said, this springtime ver- 
dure and bloom, this fragrance of the furze, the 
infinite blue of heaven, the bell-like double note 
of this my little feathered neighbour in the alder 
tree, flitting hither and thither, light and airy 
himself as a wind-fluttered alder leaf — surely 
this is enough to fill and to satisfy any heart, 
leaving no room for a grief so vain and barren, 
which nothing in nature suggested! That it 
should find me out here in this wilderness of 
all places — the place to which a man might 
come to divest himself of himself — that second 
self which he has unconsciously acquired — to be 



266 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

like the trees and animals, outside of the sad 
atmosphere of human life and its eternal 
tragedy! A vain effort and a vain thought, since 
that from which I sought to escape came from 
nature itself, from every visible thing; every 
leaf and flower and blade was eloquent of it, 
and the very sunshine, that gave life and bril- 
liance to all things, was turned to darkness 
by it. 

Overcome and powerless, I continued sitting 
there with half-closed eyes until those sad 
images of lost friends, which had risen with so 
strange a suddenness in my mind, appeared 
something more than mere memories and men- 
tally-seen faces and forms, seen for a moment, 
then vanishing. They were with me, standing 
by me, almost as in life; and I looked from one 
to another, looking longest at the one who was 
the last to go; who was with me but yesterday, 
as it seemed, and stood still in our walk and 
turned to bid me listen to that same double 
note, that little spring melody which had re- 
turned to us; and who led me, waist-deep in the 
flowering meadow grasses to look for this same 
beautiful white flower which I had found here. 



THE RETURN OF THE CHIFF-CHAFF 267 

and called it our "English edelweiss." How 
beautiful it all was! We thought and felt as 
one. That bond uniting us, unlike all other 
bonds, was unbreakable and everlasting. If one 
had said that life was uncertain it would have 
seemed a meaningless phrase. Spring's immor- 
tality was in us; ever-living earth was better 
than any home in the stars which eye hath not 
seen nor heart conceived. Nature was all in 
all; we worshipped her and her wordless mes- 
sages in our hearts were sweeter than honey and 
the honeycomb. 

To me, alone on that April day, alone on the 
earth as it seemed for a while, the sweet was 
indeed changed to bitter, and the loss of those 
who were one with me in feeling, appeared to 
my mind as a monstrous betrayal, a thing un- 
natural, almost incredible. Could I any longer 
love and worship this dreadful power that made 
us and filled our hearts with gladness — could I 
say of it, ''Though it slay me yet will I trust it?" 

By-and-by the tempest subsided, but the 
clouds returned after the rain, and I sat on in a 
deep melancholy, my mind in a state of sus- 
pense. Then little by little the old influence 



268 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

began to re-assert itself, and it was as if one was 
standing there by me, one who was always calm, 
who saw all things clearly, who regarded me 
with compassion and had come to reason with 
me. "Come now," it appeared to say, "open 
your eyes once more to the sunshine; let it enter 
freely and fill your heart, for there is healing in 
it and in all nature. It is true the power you 
have worshipped and trusted will destroy you, 
but you are living to-day and the day of your 
end will be determined by chance only. Until 
you are called to follow them into that 'world 
of light,' or it may be of darkness and oblivion, 
you are immortal. Think then of to-day, 
humbly putting away the rebellion and despond- 
ency corroding your life, and it will be with 
you as it has been; you shall know again the 
peace which passes understanding, the old inef- 
fable happiness in the sights and sounds of 
earth. Common things shall seem rare and 
beautiful to you. Listen to the chiff-chaff in- 
geminating the familiar unchanging call and 
message of spring. Do you know that this frail 
feathered mite with its short, feeble wings has 
come back from an immense distance, crossing 



THE RETURN OF THE CHIFF-CHAFF 269 

two continents, crossing mountains, deserts il- 
limitable, and, worst of all, the salt, grey desert 
of the sea. North and north-east winds and 
snow and sleet assailed it when, weary with its 
long journey, it drew near to its bourne, and 
beat it back, weak and chilled to its little 
anxious heart, so that it could hardly keep itself 
from falling into the cold, salt waves. Yet no 
sooner is it here in the ancient home and cradle 
of its race, than, all perils and pains forgot, it 
begins to tell aloud the overflowing joy of the 
resurrection, calling earth to put on her living 
garment, to rejoice once more in the old undy- 
ing gladness — that small trumpet will teach you 
something. Let your reason serve you as well 
as its lower faculties have served this brave little 
traveller from a distant land." 

Is this then the best consolation my mysterious 
mentor can offer? How vain, how false it is! — 
how little can reason help us! The small bird 
exists only in the present; there is no past, nor 
future, nor knowledge of death. Its every ac- 
tion is the result of a stimulus from outside; its 
''bravery" is but that of a dead leaf or ball of 
thistle-down carried away by the blast. 



270 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Is there no escape, then, from this intolerable 
sadness — from the thought of springs that have 
been, the beautiful multitudinous life that has 
vanished? Our maker and mother mocks at our 
efforts — at our philosophic refuges, and sweeps 
them away with a wave of emotion. And yet 
there is deliverance, the old way of escape 
which is ours, whether we want it or not. Na- 
ture herself in her own good time heals the 
wound she inflicts — even this most grievous in 
seeming when she takes away from us the faith 
and hope of reunion with our lost. They may 
be in a world of light, waiting our coming — we 
do not know; but in that place they are unim- 
aginable, their state inconceivable. They were 
like us, beings of flesh and blood, or we should 
not have loved them. If we cannot grasp their 
hands their continued existence is nothing to us. 
Grief at their loss is just as great for those who 
have kept their faith as for those who have lost 
it; and on account of its very poignancy it can- 
not endure in either case. It fades, returning 
in its old intensity at ever longer intervals until 
it ceases. The poet of nature was wrong when 
he said that without his faith in the decay of his 



THE RETURN OF THE CHIFF-CHAFF 271 

senses he would be worse than dead, echoing 
the apostle who said that if we had hope in this 
world only we should be of all men the most 
miserable. So, too, was the later poet wrong 
when he listened to the waves on Dover beach 
bringing the eternal notes of sadness in; when 
he saw in imagination the ebbing of the great 
sea of faith which had made the world so beau- 
tiful, in its withdrawal disclosing the deserts 
drear and naked shingles of the world. That 
desolation, as he imagined it, which made him 
so unutterably sad, was due to the erroneous idea 
that our earthly happiness comes to us from 
otherwhere, some region outside our planet, just 
as one of our modern philosophers has imagined 
that the principle of life on earth came origi- 
nally from the stars. 

The "naked shingles of the world" is but a 
mood of our transitional day; the world is just 
as beautiful as it ever was, and our dead as much 
to us as they have ever been, even when faith 
was at its highest. They are not wholly, irre- 
trievably lost, even when we cease to remember 
them, when their images come no longer unbid- 
den to our minds. They are present in nature: 



272 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

through ourselves, receiving but what we give, 
they have become part and parcel of it and give 
it an expression. As when the rain clouds dis- 
perse and the sun shines out once more, heaven 
and earth are filled with a chastened light, sweet 
to behold and very wonderful, so because of our 
lost ones, because of the old grief at their loss, 
the visible world is touched v/ith a new light, a 
tenderness and grace and beauty not its own. 



XXXII 
A WASP AT TABLE 

EVEN to a naturalist with a tolerant feeling 
for all living things, both great and small, 
it is not always an unmixed pleasure to have a 
wasp at table. I have occasionally felt a con- 
siderable degree of annoyance at the presence 
of a self-invited guest of that kind. 

Some time ago when walking I sat down at 
noon on a fallen tree-trunk to eat my luncheon, 
which consisted of a hunk of cake and some 
bananas. The wind carried the fragrance of the 
fruit into the adjacent wood, and very soon 
wasps began to arrive, until there were fifteen 
or twenty about me. They were so aggressive 
and greedy, almost following every morsel I 
took into my mouth, that I determined to let 
them have as much as they wanted — and some- 
thing morel I proceeded to make a mash of 
the ripest portions of the fruit mixed with 
whisky from my pocket-flask, and spread it 

273 



274 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

nicely on the bark. At once they fell on it with 
splendid appetites, but to my surprise the alco- 
hol produced no effect. I have seen big locusts 
and other important insects tumbling about and 
acting generally as if demented after a few sips 
of rum and sugar, but these wasps, when they 
had had their full of banana and whisky, buzzed 
about and came and went and quarrelled with 
one another just as usual, and when I parted 
from them there was not one of the company 
who could be said to be the worse for liquor. 
Probably there is no more steady-headed in- 
sect than the wasp, unless it be his noble cousin 
and prince, the hornet, who has a quite human- 
like unquenchable thirst for beer and cider. 

But the particular wasp at table I had in my 
mind remains to be spoken of. I was lunching 
at the house of a friend, the vicar of a lonely 
parish in Hampshire, and besides ourselves 
there were five ladies, four of them young, at 
our round table. The window stood open, and 
by-and-by a wasp flew in and began to investi- 
gate the dishes, the plates, then the eaters them- 
selves, impartially buzzing before each face in 
turn. On his last round, before taking his de- 



A WASP AT TABLE 275 

parture, he continued to buzz so long before my 
face, first in front of one eye then the other, as 
if to make sure that they were fellows and had 
the same expression, that I at length impatiently 
remarked that I did not care for his too flatter- 
ing attentions. And that was really the only 
inconsiderate or inhospitable word his visit had 
called forth. Yet there were, I have said, five 
ladies present! They had neither welcomed nor 
repelled him, and had not regarded him; and 
although it was impossible to be unconscious of 
his presence at table, it was as if he had not been 
there. But then these ladies were cyclists: one, 
in addition to the beautiful brown colour with 
which the sun had painted her face, showed 
some dark and purple stains on cheek and fore- 
head — marks of a resent dangerous collision 
with a stone wall at the foot of a steep hill. 

Here I had intended telling about other meet- 
ings with other wasps, but having touched on a 
subject concerning which nothing is ever said 
and volumes might be written — namely, the 
part played by the bicycle in the emancipation 
of women — I will go on with it. That they are 
not really emancipated doesn't matter, since 



276 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

they move towards that goal, and doubtless they 
would have gone on at the same old, almost im- 
perceptible rate for long years but for the sud- 
den impulse imparted by the wheel. Middle- 
aged people can recall how all England held up 
its hands and shouted "No, no!" from shore to 
shore at the amazing and upsetting spectacle of 
a female sitting astride on a safety machine, in- 
decently moving her legs up and down just like 
a man. But having tasted the delights of swift 
easy motion, imparted not by any extraneous 
agency, but — oh, sweet surprise! — by her own 
in-dwelling physical energy, she refused to get 
off. By staying on she declared her independ- 
ence; and we who were looking on — some of us 
— rejoiced to see it; for did we not also see, 
when these venturesome leaders returned to us 
from careering unattended over the country, 
when easy motion had tempted them long dis- 
tances into strange, lonely places, where there 
was no lover nor brother nor any chivalrous 
person to guard and rescue them from innum- 
erable perils — from water and fire, mad bulls 
and ferocious dogs, and evil-minded tramps and 
drunken, dissolute men, and from all venomous, 



A WASP AT TABLE 277 

Stinging, creeping, nasty, horrid things — did we 
not see that they were no longer the same beings 
we had previously known, that in their long 
flights in heat and cold and rain and wind and 
dust they had shaken off some ancient weakness 
that was theirs, that without loss of femininity 
they had become more like ourselves in the sense 
that they were more self-centred and less irra- 
tional? 

But women, alas ! can seldom follow up a vic- 
tory. They are, as even the poet when most 
anxious to make the best of them mournfully 
confesses: 

variable as the shade 
By the light quivering aspen made. 

Inconstant in everything, they soon cast aside 
the toy which had taught them so great a lesson 
and served them so well, carrying them so far 
in the direction they wished to go. And no 
sooner had they cast it aside than a fresh toy, 
another piece of mechanism, came on the scene 
to captivate their hearts, and instead of a help, 
to form a hindrance. The motor not only car- 
ried them back over all the ground they had 
covered on the bicycle, but further still, almost 



278 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

back to the times of chairs and fans and smell- 
ing-salts and sprained ankles at Lyme Regis. A 
painful sight was the fair lady not yet forty and 
already fat, overclothed and muffled up in 
heavy fabrics and furs, a Pekinese clasped in 
her arms, reclining in her magnificent forty- 
horse-power car with a man {Homo sapiens) 
in livery to drive her from shop to shop and 
house to house. One could shut one's eyes until 
it passed — shut them a hundred or five hundred 
times a day in every thoroughfare in every town 
in England; but alas! one couldn't shut out the 
fact that this spectacle had fascinated and made 
captive the soul of womankind, that it was now 
their hope, their dream, their beautiful ideal — 
the one universal ideal that made all women 
sisters, from the greatest ladies in the land down- 
wards, and still down, from class to class, even 
to the semi-starved ragged little pariah girl 
scrubbing the front steps of a house in Mean 
Street for a penny. 

The splendid spectacle has now been removed 
from their sight, but is it out of mind? Are 
they not waiting and praying for the war to end 
so that there may be petrol to buy and men re- 



A WASP AT TABLE 279 

turned from the front to cast off their blood- 
stained clothes and wash and bleach their 
blackened faces, to put themselves in a pretty 
livery and drive the ladies and their Pekinese 
once more? 

A friend of mine once wrote a charming 
booklet entitled Wheel Magic, which was all 
about his rambles on the machine and its effect 
on him. He is not an athlete — on the contrary 
he is a bookish man who has written books 
enough to fill a cart, and has had so much to do 
with books all his life that one might imagine 
he had by some strange accident been born in 
the reading-room of the British Museum; or 
that originally he had actually been a book- 
worm, a sort of mite, spontaneously engendered 
between the pages of a book, and that the super- 
natural being who presides over the reading- 
room had, as a little pleasantry, transformed 
him into a man so as to enable him to read the 
books on which he had previously nourished 
himself. 

I can't follow my friend's wanderings and ad- 
ventures as, springing out of his world of books, 
he flits and glides like a vagrant, swift-winged. 



28o A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

irresponsible butterfly about the land, sipping 
the nectar from a thousand flowers and doing 
his hundred miles in a day and feeling all the 
better for it, for this was a man's book, and the 
wheel and its magic was never a necessity in 
man's life. But it has a magic of another kind 
for woman, and I wish that some woman of 
genius would arise and, inspired perhaps by the 
ghost of Benjamin Ward Richardson in his pro- 
phetic mood, tell of this magic to her sisters. 
Tell them, if they are above labour in the fields 
or at the wash-tub, that the wheel, without fa- 
tiguing, will give them the deep breath which 
will purify the blood, invigorate the heart, stif- 
fen the backbone, harden the muscles; that the 
mind will follow and accommodate itself to 
these physical changes; finally, that the wheel 
will be of more account to them than all the 
platforms in the land, and clubs of all the pion- 
eers and colleges, all congresses, titles, honours, 
votes, and all the books that have been or ever 
will be written. 



XXXIII 
WASPS AND MEN 

I NOW find that I must go back to the sub- 
ject of my last paper on the wasp in order 
to define my precise attitude towards that insect. 
Then, too, there was another wasp at table, not 
in itself a remarkably interesting incident, but 
I am anxious to relate it for the following rea- 
son. 

If there is one sweetest thought, one most 
cherished memory in a man's mind, especially 
if he be a person of gentle pacific disposition, 
whose chief desire is to live in peace and amity 
with all men, it is the thought and recollection 
of a good fight in which he succeeded in de- 
molishing his adversary. If his fights have been 
rare adventures and in most cases have gone 
against him, so much the more will he rejoice 
in that one victory. 

It chanced that a wasp flew into the breakfast 
room of a country house in which I was a guest, 

281 



282 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

when we were all — about fourteen in number, 
mostly ladies, young and middle-aged — seated 
at the table. The wasp went his rounds in the 
usual way, dropping into this or that plate or 
dish, feeling foods with his antennae or tasting 
with his tongue, but staying nowhere, and as he 
moved so did the ladies, starting back with little 
screams and exclamations of disgust and appre- 
hension. For these ladies, it hardly need be 
said, were not cyclists. Then the son of the 
house, a young gentleman of twenty-t\vo, a 
footballer and general athlete, got up, pushed 
back his chair and said: "Don't worry, I'll soon 
settle his hash." 

Then I too rose from my seat, for I had made 
a vow not to allow a wasp to be killed unneces- 
sarily in my presence. 

"Leave it to me, please," I said, "and I'll put 
him out in a minute." 

"No, sit down," he returned. "I have said 
I'm going to kill it." 

"You shall not," I returned; and then the two 
of us, serviettes in hand, went for the wasp, who 
got frightened and flew all round the room, we 
after it. After some chasing he rose high and 



WASPS AND MEN 283 

then made a dash at the window, but instead 
of making its escape at the lower open part, 
struck the glass. 

"Now I've got him!" cried my sportsman in 
great glee; but he had not got him, for I closed 
with him, and we swayed about and put forth all 
our strength, and finally came down with a crash 
on a couch under the window. Then after 
some struggling I succeeded in getting on top, 
and with my right hand on his face and my knee 
on his body to keep him pressed down, I man- 
aged with my left hand to capture the wasp and 
put him out. 

Then we got up — he with a scarlet face, furi- 
ous at being baulked; but he was a true sports- 
man, and without one word went back to his seat 
at the table. 

Undoubtedly it was a disgraceful scene in a 
room full of ladies, but he, not I, provoked it 
and was the ruffian, as I'm sure he will be ready 
to confess if he ever reads this. 

But why all this fuss over a wasp's life, and 
in such circumstances, in a room full of nervous 
ladies, in a house where I was a guest? It was 
not that I care more for a wasp than for any 



284 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Other living creature — I don't love them in the 
St. Francis way; the wasp is not my little sister; 
but I hate to see any living creature unneces- 
sarily, senselessly, done to death. There are 
other creatures I can see killed without a qualm 
— flies, for instance, especially houseflies and 
the big blue-bottle; these are, it was formerly 
believed, the progeny of Satan, and modern sci- 
entists are inclined to endorse that ancient no- 
tion. The wasp is a redoubtable fly-killer, and 
apart from his merits, he is a perfect and beau- 
tiful being, and there is no more sense in killing 
him than in destroying big game and a thousand 
beautiful wild creatures that are harmless to 
man. Yet this habit of killing a wasp is so com- 
mon, ingrained as it were, as to be almost uni- 
versal among us, and is found in the gentlest and 
humanest person, and even the most spiritual- 
minded men come to regard it as a sort of re- 
ligious duty and exercise, as the incident I am 
going to relate will show. 

I came to Salisbury one day to find it full of 
visitors, but I succeeded in getting a room in one 
of the small family hotels. I was told by the 
landlord that a congress was being held, got up 



WASPS AND MEN 285 

by the Society for the pursuit or propagation of 
Holiness, and that delegates, mostly evangelical 
clergymen and ministers of the gospel of all de- 
nominations, with many lay brothers, had come 
in from all over the kingdom and were holding 
meetings every day and all day long at one of 
the large halls. The three bedrooms on the same 
floor with mine, he said, were all occupied by 
delegates who had travelled from the extreme 
north of England. 

In the evening I met these three gentlemen 
and heard all about their society and congress 
and its aim and work from them. 

Next morning at about half-past six I was 
roused from sleep by a tremendous commotion in 
the room adjoining mine: cries and shouts, hur- 
ried trampings over the floor, blows on walls and 
windows and the crash of overthrown furniture. 
However, before I could shake my sleep off and 
get up to find out the cause, there were shouts 
of laughter, a proof that no one had been killed 
or seriously injured, and I went to sleep again. 

Atbreakfastwe met once more, and I was asked 
if I had been much disturbed by the early morn- 
ing noise and excitement. They proceeded to 



286 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

explain that a wasp had got into the room of 
their friend — indicating the elderly gentleman 
who had taken the head of the table; and as he 
was an invalid and afraid of being stung, he had 
shouted to them to come to his aid. They had 
tumbled out of bed and rushed in, and before 
beginning operations had made him cover his 
face and head with the bedclothes, after which 
they started hunting the wasp. But he was too 
clever for them. They threw things at him and 
struck at him with their garments, pillows, slip- 
pers, whatever came to hand, and still he es- 
caped, and in rushing round in their excitement 
everything in the room except the bedstead was 
overthrown. At last the wasp, tired out or ter- 
rified dropped to the floor, and they were on him 
like a shot and smashed him with the slippers 
they had in their hands. 

"And you call yourselves religious men!" I 
remarked when they had finished their story 
and looked at me expecting me to say some- 
thing. 

They stared astonished at me, then exchanged 
glances and burst out laughing, and laughed as 
if they had heard something too excruciatingly 



WASPS AND MEN 287 

funny. The elderly clergyman who had been 
saved from the winged man-eating dragon that 
had invaded his room managed at last to recover 
his gravity, and his friends followed suit; they 
then all three silently looked at me again as if 
they expected to hear something more. 

Not to disappoint them, I started telling them 
about the life and work of a famous nobleman, 
one of England's great pro-consuls, who for 
many years had ruled over various countries in 
distant regions of the earth, and many barbar- 
ous and semi-savage nations, by whom he was 
regarded, for his wisdom and justice and sym- 
pathy with the people he governed, almost as 
a god. This great man, who was now living in 
retirement at home, had just founded a Society 
for the Protection of Wasps, and had so far 
admitted two of his friends who were in sympa- 
thy with his objects to membership. As soon as 
I heard of the society I had sent in an applica- 
tion to be admitted, too, and felt it would be 
a proud day for me if the founder considered 
me worthy of being the fourth member. 

Having concluded my remarks, the three re- 
ligious gentlemen, who had listened attentively 



288 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

and seriously to my praises of the great pro- 
consul, once more exchanged glances and again 
burst out laughing, and continued laughing, 
rocking in their chairs with laughter, until they 
could laugh no more for exhaustion, and the 
elderly gentleman removed his spectacles to 
wipe the tears from his eyes. 

Such extravagant mirth surprised me in that 
grey-haired man who was manifestly in very 
bad health, yet had travelled over three hundred 
miles from his remote Cumberland parish to 
give the benefit of his burning thoughts to his 
fellow-seekers after holiness congregated at Sal-, 
isbury from all parts of the country. 

The gust of merriment having blown its fill, 
ending quite naturally in "minute drops from 
ofif the eaves," I gravely wished them good-bye 
and left the room. They did not know, they 
never suspected that the amusement had been on 
both sides, and that despite their laughter it had 
been ten times greater on mine than on theirs. 

I can't in conclusion resist the temptation to 
tell just one more wasp incident, although I fear 
it will hurt the tender-hearted and religious 
reader's susceptibilities more than any of those 



WASPS AND MEN 289 

I have already told. But it will be told briefly, 
without digression and moralisings. 

We have come to regard Nature as a sort of 
providence who is mindful of us and recom- 
penses us according to what our lives are — 
whether we worship her and observe her ordi- 
nances or find our pleasure in breaking them 
and mocking her who will not be mocked. But 
it is sad for those who have the feeling of kin- 
ship for all living things, both great and small, 
from the whale and the elephant down even to 
the harvest mouse and beetle and humble earth- 
worm, to know that killing — killing for sport or 
fun — is not forbidden in her decalogue. If the 
killing at home is not sufficient to satisfy a man, 
he can transport himself to the Dark Continent 
and revel in the slaughter of all the greatest 
and noblest forms of life on the globe. There 
is no crime and no punishment and no comfort 
to those who are looking on, except some on ex- 
ceedingly rare occasion when we receive a thrill 
of joy at the lamentable tidings of the violent 
death of some noble young gentleman beloved 
of everybody and a big-game hunter, who was 
elephant-shooting, when one of the great brutes, 



290 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Stung to madness by his wounds, turned, even 
when dying, on his persecutor and trampled 
him to death. 

In a small, pretty, out-of-the-world village in 
the West of England I made the acquaintance 
of the curate, a boyish young fellow not long 
from Oxford, who was devoted to sport and a 
great killer. He was not satisfied with cricket 
and football in their seasons and golf and lawn 
tennis — he would even descend to croquet when 
there was nothing else — and boxing and fencing, 
and angling in the neighbouring streams, but he 
had to shoot something every day as well. And 
it was noticed by the villagers that the shooting 
fury was always strongest on him on Mondays. 
They said it was a reaction; that after the re- 
straint of Sunday with its three services, espe- 
cially the last when he was permitted to pour out 
his wild curatical eloquence, the need of doing 
something violent and savage was most power- 
ful; that he had, so to say, to wash out the Sun- 
day taste with blood. 

One August, on one of these Mondays, he was 
dodging along a hedge-side with his gun trying 
to get a shot at some bird, when he unfortunately 



WASPS AND MEN 291 

thrust his foot into a populous wasps' nest, and 
the infuriated wasps issued in a cloud and in- 
flicted many stings on his head and face and 
neck and hands, and on other parts of his anat- 
omy where they could thrust their little needles 
through his clothes. 

This mishap was the talk of the village. 
"Never mind," they said cheerfully — they were 
all very cheerful over it — "he's a good sports- 
man, and like all of that kind, hard as nails, and 
he'll soon be all right, making a joke of it." 

The result "proved the rogues, they lied," 
that he was not hard as nails, but from that day 
onwards was a very poor creature indeed. The 
brass and steel wires in his system had degen- 
erated into just those poor little soft grey threads 
which others have and are subject to many fan- 
tastical ailments. He fell into a nervous con- 
dition and started and blanched and was con- 
fused when suddenly hailed or spoken to even 
by some harmless old woman. He trembled at 
a shadow, and the very sight and sound of a 
wasp in the breakfast room when he was trying 
to eat a little toast and marmalade filled him, 
thrilled him, with fantastic terrors never felt 



292 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

before. And in vain to still the beating of his 
heart he would sit repeating: "It's only a wasp 
and nothing more." Then some of the par- 
ishioners who loved animals, for there are usu- 
ally one or two like that in a village, began to 
say that it was a "judgment" on him, that old 
Mother Nature, angry at the persecutions of her 
feathered children by this young cleric who was 
supposed to be a messenger of mercy, had re- 
venged herself on him in that way, using her 
little yellow insects as her ministers. 



XXXIV 
IN CHITTERNE CHURCHYARD 

CHITTERNE is one of those small out-of- 
the-world villages in the south Wiltshire 
downs which attract one mainly because of their 
isolation and loneliness and their unchangeable- 
ness. Here, however, you discover that there 
has been an important change in comparatively 
recent years — some time during the first half of 
the last century. Chitterne, like most villages, 
possesses one church, a big building with a tall 
spire standing in its central part. Before it was 
built there were two churches and two Chit- 
ternes — two parishes with one village, each with 
its own proper church. These were situated at 
opposite ends of the one long street, and were 
small ancient buildings, each standing in its own 
churchyard. One of these disused burying- 
places, with a part of the old building still stand- 
ing in it, is a peculiarly attractive spot, all the 
more so because of long years of neglect and of 

^293 



294 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

ivy, bramble, and weed and flower of many 
kinds that flourish in it, and have long obliter- 
ated the mounds and grown over the few tombs 
and headstones that still exist in the ground. 

It was an excessively hot August afternoon 
when I last visited Chitterne, and, wishing to 
rest for an hour before proceeding on my way, 
I went to this old churchyard, naturally think- 
ing that I should have it all to myself. But I 
found two persons there, both old women of the 
peasant class, meanly dressed; yet it was evident 
they had their good clothes on and were neat 
and clean, each with a basket on her arm, prob- 
ably containing her luncheon. For they were 
only visitors and strangers there, and strangers 
to one another as they were to me — that, too, I 
could guess : also that they had come there with 
some object — perhaps to find some long unvis- 
ited grave, for they were walking about, cross- 
ing and recrossing each other's track, pausing 
from time to time to look round, then pulling 
the ivy aside from some old tomb and reading 
or trying to read the worn, moss-grown inscrip- 
tion. I began to watch their movements with 
growing interest, and could see that they, too. 



IN CHITTERNE CHURCHYARD 295 

were very much interested in each other, al- 
though for a long time they did not exchange a 
word. Presently I, too, fell to examining the 
gravestones, just to get near them, and while 
pretending to be absorbed in the inscriptions I 
kept a sharp eye on their movements. They 
took no notice of me. I was nothing to them — 
merely one of another class, a foreigner, so to 
speak, a person cycling about the country who 
was just taking a ten minutes' peep at the place 
to gratify an idle curiosity. But who was she — 
that other old woman; and what did she want 
hunting about there in this old forsaken church- 
yard? was doubtless what each of those two was 
saying to herself. And by-and-by their curiosity 
got the better of them; then contrived to meet at 
one stone which they both appeared anxious to 
examine. 

I had anticipated this, and no sooner were 
they together than I was down on my knees bus- 
ily pulling the ivy aside from a stone three or 
four yards from theirs, absorbed in my business. 
They bade each other good day and said some- 
thing about the hot weather, which led one to 
remark that she had found it very trying as she 



296 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

had left home early to walk to Salisbury to take 
the train to Codford, and from there she had 
walked again to Chitterne. Oddly enough, the 
other old woman had also been travelling all 
day, but from an opposite direction, over Somer- 
set way, just to visit Chitterne. It seemed an 
astonishing thing to them when it came out that 
they had both been looking forward for years 
to this visit, and that it should have been made 
on the same day, and that they should have met 
there in that same forsaken little graveyard. It 
seemed stranger still when they came to tell 
why they had made this long-desired visit. They 
were both natives of the village, and had both 
left it early in life, one aged seven, the other ten; 
they had left much about the same time, and had 
never returned until now. And they were now 
here with the same object — just to find the 
graves, unmarked by a stone, where the mother 
of one of them, the grandparents of both, and 
other relatives they still remembered had been 
buried more than half a century ago. They were 
surprised and troubled at their failure to iden- 
tify the very spots where the mounds used to be. 
"It do all look so dififerent," said one, "an' the 



IN CHITTERNE CHURCHYARD 297 

old stones be mostly gone." Finally, when they 
told their names and their fathers' names — 
farm-labourers both — they failed to remember 
each other, and could only suppose that they 
must have forgotten many things about their 
far-off childhood, although others were still as 
well remembered as the incidents of yesterday. 
The old dames had become very friendly and 
confidential by this time. "I dare say," I said 
to myself, ''that if I can manage to stay to the 
end I shall see them embrace and kiss at part- 
ing," and I also thought that their strange meet- 
ing in the old village churchyard would be a 
treasured memory for the rest of their lives. I 
feared they would suspect me of eavesdropping, 
and taking out my penknife, I began diligently 
scraping the dead black moss from the letters on 
the stone, after which I made pretence of copy- 
ing the illegible inscription in my notebook. 
They, however, took no notice of me, and began 
telling each other what their lives had been since 
they left Chitterne. Both had married working 
men and had lost their husbands many years ago ; 
one was sixty-nine, the other in her sixty-sixth 
year, and both were strong and well able to work, 



298 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

although they had had hard lives. Then in a tone 
of triumph, their faces lighting up with a kind 
of joy, they informed each other that they had 
never had to go to the parish for relief. Each 
was anxious to be first in telling how it had come 
about that she, the poor widow of a working 
man, had been so much happier in her old age 
than so many others. So eager were they to tell 
it that when one spoke the other would cut in 
long before she finished, and when they talked 
together it was not easy to keep the two narra- 
tives distinct. One was the mother of four 
daughters, all still unmarried, earning their own 
livings, one in a shop, another a sempstress, two 
in service in good houses, earning good wages. 
Never had woman been so blessed in her chil- 
dren! They would never see their mother go 
to the House ! The other had but one, a son, and 
not many like him; no son ever thought more of 
his mother. He was at sea, but every nine to ten 
months he was back in Bristol, and then on to 
visit her, and never let a month pass without 
writing to her and sending money to pay her 
rent and keep a nice comfortable home for him. 
They congratulated one another; then the 



IN CHITTERNE CHURCHYARD 299 

mother of four said she always thanked God for 
giving her daughters, because they were women 
and could feel for a mother. The other replied 
that it was true, she had often seen it, the way 
daughters stuck to their mother — until they 
married. She was thankful to have a son ; a man, 
she said, is a man and can go out in the world 
and do things, and if he is a good son he will 
never see his mother want. 

The other was nettled at that speech. "Of 
course a man's a man," she returned, "but we 
all know what men are. They are all right till 
they pick up with a girl who wants all their 
wages; then everyone, mother and all, must be 
given up." But a daughter was a daughter al- 
ways; she had four, she was happy to say. 

This made matters worse. "Daughters always 
daughters!" came the quick rejoinder. "I 
never learned that before. What, my son take 
up with a girl and leave his old mother to starve 
or go to the workhouse! I never heard such a 
foolish thing said in my life!" And, being now 
quite angry, she looked round for her basket and 
shawl so as to get away as quickly as possible 
from that insulting woman; but the other, guess- 



300 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

ing her intention, was too quick for her and 
started at once to the gate, but after going four 
or five steps turned and delivered her last shot: 
"Say what you like about your son, and I don't 
doubt he's been good to you, and I only hope 
it'll always be the same; but what I say is, give 
me a daughter, and I know, ma'am, that if you 
had a daughter you'd be easier in your mind!" 
Having spoken, she made for the gate, and the 
other, stung in some vital part by the last words, 
stood motionless, white with anger, staring after 
her, first in silence, but presently she began talk- 
ing audibly to herself. ''My son — my son pick 
up with a girl! My son leave his mother to go 
on the parish!" — but I stayed to hear no more; 
it made me laugh and — it was too sad. 



XXXV 

A HAUNTER OF CHURCHYARDS 

I SAID a little while ago that when staying 
at a village I am apt to become a haunter of 
its churchyard; but I go not to it in the spirit of 
our well-beloved Mr. Pecksniff. He, it will be 
remembered, was accustomed to take an occa- 
sional turn among the tombs in the graveyard 
at Amesbury, or wherever it was, to read and 
commit to memory the pious and admonitory 
phrases he found on the stones, to be used later 
as a garnish to his beautiful, elevating talk. The 
attraction for me, which has little to do with 
inscriptions, was partly stated in the last sketch, 
and I may come to it again by-and-by. 

Nevertheless, I cannot saunter or sit down 
among these memorials without paying some at- 
tention to the lettering on them, and always with 
greatest interest in those which time and 
weather and the corrosive lichen have made il- 

301 



302 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

legible. The old stones that are no longer vis- 
ited, on which no fresh-gathered flower is ever 
laid, which mark the last resting-places of the 
men and women who were once the leading 
members of the little rustic community, and are 
now forgotten for ever, whose bones for a cen- 
tury past have been crumbling to dust. And the 
children's children, and remoter descendants of 
these dead, where are they? since one refuses to 
believe that they inhabit this land any longer. 
Under what suns, then, by what mountains and 
what mighty rivers, on what great green or sun- 
parched plains and in what roaring cities in far- 
off continents? They have forgotten; they have 
no memory nor tradition of these buried ones, 
nor perhaps even know the name of this village 
where they lived and died. Yet w^e believe that 
something from these same dead survives in 
them — something, too, of the place, the village, 
the soil, an inherited memory and emotion. At 
all events we know that, wheresoever they may 
be, that their soul is English still, that they 
will hearken to their mother's voice when she 
calls and come to her from the very ends of the 
earth. 



A HAUNTER OF CHURCHYARDS 303 

As to the modern stones with inscriptions 
made so plain that you can read them at a dis- 
tance of twenty yards, one cultivates the art of 
not seeing them, since if you look attentively at 
them and read the dull formal inscription, the 
disgust you will experience at their extreme 
ugliness will drive you from the spot, and so 
cause you to miss some delicate loveliness lurk- 
ing there, like a violet "half hidden from the 
eye." But I need not go into this subject here, as 
I have had my say about it in a well-known book 
— Hampshire Days, 

The stones I look at are of the seventeenth, 
eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth cen- 
turies, for even down to the fifties of last century 
something of the old tradition lingered on, and 
not all the stones were shaped and lettered in 
imitation of an auctioneer's advertisement 
posted on a barn door. 

In reading the old inscriptions, often de- 
ciphered with difficulty after scraping away the 
moss and lichen, we occasionally discover one 
that has the charm of quaintness, or which 
touches our heart or sense of humour in such a 
way as to tempt us to copy it into a note-book. 



304 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

In this way I have copied a fair number, and in 
glancing over my old note-books containing 
records of my rambles and observations, mostly 
natural history, I find these old epitaphs scat- 
tered through them. But I have never copied 
an inscription with the intention of using it. And 
this for the sufficient reason that epitaphs col- 
lected in a book do not interest me or anyone. 
They are in the wrong place in a book and can- 
not produce the same effect as when one finds 
and spells them out on a weathered stone or 
mural tablet out or inside a village church. It 
is the atmosphere — the place, the scene, the asso- 
ciations, which give it its only value and some- 
times make it beautiful and precious. The stone 
itself, its ancient look, half-hidden in many 
cases by ivy, and clothed over in many-coloured 
moss and lichen and aerial algae, and the stone- 
cutter's handiwork, his lettering, and the epi- 
taphs he revelled in — all this is lost when you 
take the inscription away and print it. Take 
this one, for instance, as a specimen of a fairly 
good seventeenth-century epitaph, from Shrew- 
ton, a village on Salisbury Plain, not far from 
Stonehenge: 



A HAUNTER OF CHURCHYARDS 305 

F£RE ]S MY HOPE T/LLTRVMP 

SmLL SOVND A/VD CWIST 

FOR rAEE DOTH CALL TEN 

SHALL I RISE FRrA DEATJ 

TO LI FE NOE tAORETD 

DYE AT ALL 

n 

hERE llES T£ BoDVoFKOBEr 

VYANXSROVGH THE 3^ 
£• O "ET> 

or Y A//\r€ V^ DEPART TH/5 
JLIFE:DEC Y 9 AOBNI 16-]^ 

It would not be very interesting to put this in 
a book : 

Here is my hope till trump shall sound 

And Christ for me doth call, 
Then shall I rise from death to life 

No more to die at all. 

But it was interesting to find it there, to ex- 
amine the old lettering and think perhaps that 
if you had been standing at the elbow of the old 
lapidary, two and a half centuries ago, you 



3o6 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

might have given him a wrinkle in the econo- 
mising of space and labour. In any case, to find 
it there in the dim, rich interior of that ancient 
village church, to view it in a religious or rev- 
erent mood, and then by-and-by in the dusty 
belfry to stumble on other far older memorials 
of the same family, and finally, coming out into 
the sunny churchyard, to come upon the same 
name once more in an inscription which tells 
you that he died in 1890, aged 88. And you 
think it a good record after nine generations, 
and that the men who lie under these wide skies 
on these open chalk downs do not degenerate. 

I have copied these inscriptions for a purpose 
of my own, just as one plucks a leaf or a flower 
and drops it between the pages of a book he is 
reading to remind him on some future occasion, 
when by chance he finds it again on opening 
the book at some future time, of the scene, the 
place, the very mood of the moment. 

Now, after all said, I am going to quote a few 
of my old gleanings from gravestones, not be- 
cause they are good of their kind — my collec- 
tion will look poor and meagre enough com- 
pared with those that others have made — but I 



A HAUNTER OF CHURCHYARDS 307 

have an object in doing it which will appear 
presently in the comments. 

Always the best epitaphs to be found in books 
are those composed by versifiers for their own 
and the reading public's amusement, and always 
the best in the collection are the humorous ones. 

The first collection I ever read was by the 
Spanish poet, Martinez de la Rosa, and al- 
though I was a boy then, I can still remember 
one: 

Aqui Fray Diego reposa. 

Jamas hiso otra cosa. ^ 

Which, translated literally, means: 

Here Friar James reposes: 
He never did anything else. 

This does well enough on the printed page, but 
would shock the mind if seen on a gravestone, 
and perhaps the rarest of all epitaphs are the 
humorous ones. But one is pleased to meet with 
the unconsciously humorous; the little titilla- 
tion, the smile, is a relief, and does not take away 
the sense of the tragedy of life and the mournful 
end. 

A good specimen of the unconsciously humor- 



3o8 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

ous epitaph is on a stone in the churchyard at 
Maddington, a small village in the Wiltshire 
Downs, dated 1843: 

These few lines have been procured 
To tell the pains which he endured, 
He was crushed to death by the fall 
Of an old mould'ring, tottering wall. 
All ye young people that pass by 
Remember this and breathe a sigh, 
Lord, let him hear thy pard'ning voice 
And make his broken bones rejoice. 

A better one, from the little village of Mylor, 
near Falmouth, has I fancy been often copied; 

His foot it slipped and he did fall, 
Help! help! he cried, and that was all. 

And still a better one I found in the churchyard 
of St. Margaret's at Lynn, to John Holgate, 
aged 27, who died in 171 2: 

He hath gained his port and is at ease, 

And hath escapt y^ danger of y^ seas, 

His glass is run his life is gone, 

Which to my thought never did no man no wronge. 

That last line is remarkable, for although its ten 
slow words have apparently fallen by chance 



A HAUNTER OF CHURCHYARDS 309 

into that form and express nothing but a little 
negative praise of their subject, they say some- 
thing more by implication. They conceal a 
mournful protest against the cruelty and injus- 
tice of his lot, and remind us of the old Italian 
folk-song, "O Barnaby, why did you die?" With 
plenty of wine in the house and salad in the gar- 
den, how wrong, how unreasonable of you to 
die! But even while blaming you in so many 
words, we know, O Barnaby, that the decision 
came not from you, and was an outrage, but 
dare not say so lest he himself should be listen- 
ing, and in his anger at one word should take us 
away too before our time. It is unconsciously 
humorous, yet with the sense of tears in it. 

But there is no sense of tears in the uncon- 
scious humour of the solemn or pompous epi- 
taph composed by the village ignoramus. 

A century ago the village idiot was almost al- 
ways a member of the little rustic community, 
and was even useful to it in two distinct ways. 
He was ''God's Fool," and compassion and 
sweet beneficent instinct, or soul growths, flour- 
ished the more for his presence; and secondly, 
he was a perpetual source of amusement, a sort 



3IO A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

of free cinema provided by Nature for the chil- 
dren's entertainment. I am not sure that his 
removal has not been a loss to the little rural 
centres of life. 

Side by side with the village idiot there was 
the pompous person who could not only read a 
book, but could put whole sentences together 
and even make rhymes, and who on these 
grounds took an important part in the life of 
the community. He was not only adviser and 
letter-writer to his neighbours, but often com- 
posed inscriptions for their gravestones when 
they were dead. But in the best specimen of 
this kind which I have come upon, I feel pretty 
sure, from internal evidence, that the buried 
man had composed his own epitaph, and prob- 
ably designed the form of the stone and its orna- 
mentation. I found this stone in the church- 
yard of Minturne Magna, in Dorset. The stone 
was five feet high and four and a half broad — a 
large canvas, so to speak. On the upper half a 
Tree of Knowledge was depicted, with leaves 
and apples, the serpent wound about the trunk, 
with Adam and Eve standing on either side. Eve 
is extending her arm, with an apple in her open 



A HAUNTER OF CHURCHYARDS 311 

hand, to Adam, and he, foolish man, is putting 
out a hand to take it. Then follows the extraor- 
dinary inscription: 

Here lyeth the Body 

Of Richard Elambert, 

Late of Holnust, who died 

June 6, in the year 1805, in the 

100 year of his age. 
Neighbours make no stay, 
Return unto the Lord, 
Nor put it off from day to day, 
For Death's a debt ye all must pay. 
Ye knoweth not how soon, 
It may be the next moment, 
Night, morning or noon. 
I set this as a caution 
To my neighbours in rime, 
God give grace that you 
May all repent in time. 
For what God has decreed 
We surely must obey, 
For when please God to send 
His death's dart into us so keen, 
O then we must go hence 
And be no more here seen. 

ALSO 

Handy lyeth here 

Dianna Elambert, 

Which was my only daughter dear. 

Who died Jan. 10, 1776, 

In the 1 8th year of her age. 



312 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Poor Diana deserved a less casual word! 

Enough of that kind. The next to follow is 
the quite plain, sensible, narrative inscription, 
with no pretension to fine diction, albeit in 
rhyme. Oddly enough the most perfect ex- 
ample I have found is in the churchyard at Kew, 
which seems too near to London : 

Here lyith the bodies of Robert and Ann 
Plaistow, late of Tyre, Edghill, in Warwickshire, 
Dyed August 23, 1728. 
At Tyre they were born and bred 
And in the same good lives they led, 
Until they come to married state, 
Which was to them most fortunate. 
Near sixty years of mortal life 
They were a happy man and wife, 
And being so by Nature tyed 
When one fell sick the other dyed, 
And both together laid in dust 
To await the rising of the just. 
They had six children born and bred. 
And five before them being dead, 
Their only then surviving son 
Hath caused this stone for to be done. 

After this little masterpiece I will quote no 
other in this class. 

After copying some scores of inscriptions, 
we find that there has always been a convention 



A HAUNTER OF CHURCHYARDS 313 

or fashion in such things, and that it has been 
constantly but gradually changing during the 
last three centuries. Very few of the seven- 
teenth century, which are the best, are now de- 
cipherable, out of doors at all events. In an old 
graveyard you will perhaps find two or three 
among two or three hundred stones, yet you be- 
lieve that two to three hundred years ago the 
small space was as thickly peopled with stones 
as now. The two or three or more that have 
not perished are of the very hardest kind of 
stone, and the old letters often show that they 
were cut with great difficulty. We also find that 
apart from the convention of the age or time, 
there were local conventions or fashions. In 
some parts of the South of England you find 
numbers of enormous stones five feet high and 
nearly as broad. This mode has long vanished. 
But you find a resemblance in the inscriptions 
as well. Thus, wherever the Methodists ob- 
tained a firm hold on the community, you find 
the spirit of ugliness appearing in the village 
churchyard from the middle of the eighteenth 
century onwards, when the old ornate and beau- 
tiful stones with figures of winged cherubs bear- 



314 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

ing torches, scattering flowers or blowing trum- 
pets, were the usual decorations, giving place 
to the plain or ugly stone with its square ugly 
lettering and the dull monotonous form of the 
inscription. "To the memory of Mr. Buggins 
of this parish, who died on February 27th, 1801, 
aged 67." And then, to save trouble and ex- 
pense, a verse from a hymn, or the simple state- 
ment that he is asleep in Jesus, or is awaiting 
the resurrection. 

I am inclined to blame Methodism for these 
horrors simply because it is, as we know, the 
cult of ugliness, but there may have been another 
cause for the change; it was perhaps to some 
extent a reaction against the stilted, the pompous 
and silly epitaph which one finds most common 
in the first half of the eighteenth century. 

Here is a perfect specimen which I found at 
St. Just, in Cornwall, to a Martin Williams, 
1771: 

Life's but a snare, a Labyrinth of Woe 

Which wretched Man is doomed to struggle through. 

To-day he's great, to-morrow he's undone, 

And thus with Hope and Fear he blunders on, 

Till some disease, or else perhaps old Age 

Calls us poor Mortals trembling from the Stage. 



A HAUNTER OF CHURCHYARDS 315 

An amusing variant of one of the commoner 
forms of that time appears at Lelant, a Cornish 
village near St. Ives: 

What now you are so once was me, 
What now I am that you will be, 
Therefore prepare to follow me. 

No less remarkable m grammar as in the iden- 
tical or perfect rhyme in the first and third lines. 
The author or adapter could have escaped this 
by making the two first the expression of the 
person buried beneath, and the third the com- 
ment from the outsider, as follows : 

Therefore prepare to follow she. 

It was a woman, I must say. 

This form of epitaph is quite common, and I 
need not give here more examples from my 
notes, but the better convention coming down 
from the preceding age goes on becoming more 
and more modified all through the eighteenth, 
and even to the middle of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. 

The following from St. Erth, a Cornish vil- 
lage, is a most suitable inscription on the grave 



3i6 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

of an old woman who was a nurse in the same 
family from iv^o to 1814: 

Time rolls her ceaseless course; the race of yore 
That danced our infancy on their knee 
And told our wondering children Legends lore 
Of strange adventures haped by Land and Sea, 
How are they blotted from the things that be! 

There are many beautiful stones and appro- 
priate inscriptions during all that long period, 
in spite of the advent of Mr. Buggins and his 
ugliness, and the charm and pathos is often in a 
phrase, a single line, as in this from St. Keverne, 
1710, a widow's epitaph on her husband: 

Rest here awhile, thou dearest part of me. 

But let us now get back another century at a 
jump, to the Jacobean and Caroline period. And 
for these one must look as a rule in interiors, 
seeing that, where exposed to the weather, the 
lettering, if not the whole stone, has perished. 
Perhaps the best specimen of the grave inscrip- 
tion, lofty but not pompous, of that age which 
I have met with is on a tablet in Ripon Cathe- 
dral to Hugh de Ripley, a locally important 
man who died in 1637: 



A HAUNTER OF CHURCHYARDS 317 

Others seek titles to their tombs 
Thy deeds to thy name prove new wombes 
And scutcheons to deck their Herse 
Which thou need'st not like teares and vers. 
If I should praise thy thriving w^itt 
Or thy v^^eighed judgment serving it 
Thy even and thy like straight ends 
Thy pitie to God and to friends 
The last would still the greatest be 
And yet all jointly less than thee. 
Thou studiedst conscience more than fame 
Still to thy gathered selfe the same. 
Thy gold was not thy saint nor welth 
Purchased by rapine worse than stealth 
Nor did'st thou brooding on it sit 
Not doing good till death with it. 
This many may blush at when they see 
What thy deeds were what theirs should be. 
Thou'st gone before and I wait now 
T'expect my when and wait my how 
Which if my Jesus grant like thine 
Who wets my grave's no friend of mine. 

Rather too long for my chapter, but I quote it 
for the sake of the last four lines, characteristic 
of that period, the age of conceits, of the love 
of fantasticalness, of Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan. 
A jump from Ripon of 600 odd miles to the 
little village of Ludgvan, near Penzance, brings 
us to a tablet of nearly the same date, 1635, and 
an inscription conceived in the same style and 



3i8 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

Spirit. It is interesting, on account of the name 
of Catherine Davy, an ancestress of the famous 
Sir Humphry, whose marble statue stands be- 
fore the Penzance Market House facing Mar- 
ket Jew Street. 

Death shall not make her memory to rott 
Her virtues were too great to be forgott. 
Heaven hath her soul where it must still remain 
The world her worth to blazon forth her fame 
The poor relieved do honour and bless her name. 
Earth, Heaven, World, Poor, do her immortalize 
Who dying lives and living never dies. 

Here is another of 1640: 

Here lyeth the body of my Husband deare 
Whom next to God I did most love and fear. 
Our loves were single: we never had but one 
And so I'll be although that thou art gone. 

Which means that she has no intention of marry- 
ing again. Why have I set this inscription 
down? Solely to tell how I copied it. I saw it 
on a brass in the obscure interior of a small 
village church in Dorset, but placed too high up 
on the wall to be seen distinctly. By piling sev- 
en hassocks on top of one another I got high up 
enough to read the date and inscription, but be- 
fore securing the name I had to get quickly 



A HAUNTER OF CHURCHYARDS 319 

down for fear of falling and breaking my neck. 
The hassocks had added five feet to my six. 

The convention of that age appears again in 
the following inscription from a tablet in Alder- 
maston church, in that beautiful little Berkshire 
village, once the home of the Congreves : 

Like borne, like new borne, here like dead they lie. 
Four virgin sisters decked with pietie 
Beauty and other graces which commend 
And made them like blessed in the end. 

Which means they were very much like each 
other, and were all as pure in heart as new-born 
babes, and that they all died unmarried. 

Where the epitaph-maker of that time occa- 
sionally went wrong was in his efforts to get his 
fantasticalness in willy-nilly, or in a silly play 
upon words, as in the following example from 
the little village of Boyton on the Wylie river, 
on a man named Barnes, who died in 1638: 

Stay Passenger and view a stack of corne 
Reaped and laid up in the Almighty's Barne 
Or rather Barnes of Choyce and precious grayne 
Put in his garner there still to remaine. 

But in the very next village — that of Stockton 
— I came on the best I have found of that time. 



320 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

It is, however, a little earlier in time, before 
fantasticalness came into fashion, and in spirit 
is of the nobler age. It is to Elizabeth Pote- 
cary, who died in 1590. 

Here she interred lies deprived of breath 

Whose light of virtue once on Earth did shyne 

Who life contemned ne feared ghostly death 

Whom worlde ne vv^orldlye cares could cause repine 

Resolved to die with hope in Heaven placed 

Her Christ to see whom living she embraced 

In paynes most fervent still in zeal most strong 

In death delighting God to magnifye 

How long will thou forgett me Lord ! this cry 

In greatest pangs was her sweet harmonye 

Forgett thee? No! he will not thee forgett 

In books of Lyfe thy name for aye is set. 

And with Elizabeth Potecary, that dear lady 
dead these three centuries and longer, I must 
bring this particular Little Thing to an end. 



XXXVI 

THE DEAD AND THE LIVING 

THE last was indeed in essence a small thing, 
but was running to such a great length it 
had to be ended before my selected best inscrip- 
tions were used up, also before the true answer 
to the question: "Why, if inscriptions do not 
greatly interest me, do I haunt churchyards?" 
was given. Let me give it now: it will serve as 
a suitable conclusion to what has already been 
said on the subject in this and in a former book. 
When we have sat too long in a close, hot, 
brilliantly-lighted, over-crowded room, a sense 
of unutterable relief is experienced on coming 
forth into the pure, fresh, cold night and filling 
our lungs with air uncontaminated with the 
poisonous gases discharged from other lungs. An 
analogous sense of immense relief, of escape 
from confinement and joyful liberation, is ex- 
perienced mentally when after long weeks or 

321 



322 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

months in London I repair to a rustic village. 
Yet, like the person who has in his excitement 
been inhaling poison into his system for long 
hours, I am not conscious of the restraint at the 
time. Not consciously conscious. The mind was 
too exclusively occupied with itself — its own 
mind affairs. The cage was only recognised as 
a cage, an unsuitable habitation, when I was out 
of it. An example, this, of the eternal dishar- 
mony between the busy mind and nature — or 
Mother Nature, let us say; the more the mind 
is concentrated on its own business the blinder 
we are to the signals of disapproval on her 
kindly countenance, the deafer to her warning 
whispers in our ear. 

The sense of relief is chiefly due to the arti- 
ficiality of the conditions of London or town 
life, and no doubt varies greatly in strength in 
town and country-bred persons; in me it is so 
strong that on first coming out to where there 
are woods and fields and hedges, I am almost 
moved to tears. 

We have recently heard the story of the little 
East-end boy on his holiday in a quiet country 
spot, who exclaimed: "How full of sound the 



THE DEAD AND THE LIVING 323 

country is! Now in London we can't hear the 
sound because of the noises." And as with sound 
— the rural sounds that are familar from of old 
and find an echo in us — so with everything: we 
do not hear nor see nor smell nor feel the earth, 
which he is, physically and mentally, in such per- 
period, the years that run to millions, that it 
has "entered the soul"; an environment with 
which he is physically and mentally, in such per- 
fect harmony that it is like an extension of him- 
self into the surrounding space. Sky and cloud 
and wind and rain, and rock and soil and water, 
and flocks and herds and all wild things, with 
trees and flowers — everywhere grass and ever- 
lasting verdure — it is all part of men, and is me, 
as I sometimes feel in a mystic mood, even as a 
religious man in a like mood feels that he is in 
a heavenly place and is a native there, one 
with it. 

Another less obvious cause of my feeling is 
that the love of our kind cannot exist, or at all 
events not unmixed with contempt and various 
other unpleasant ingredients, in people who live 
and have their being amidst thousands and mil- 
lions of their fellow-creatures herded together. 



324 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

The great thoroughfares in which we walk are 
peopled with an endless procession, an innum- 
erable multitude; we hardly see and do not look 
at or notice them, knowing beforehand that we 
do not know and never will know them to our 
dying day; from long use we have almost ceased 
to regard them as fellow-beings. 

I recall here a tradition of the Incas, which 
tells that in the beginning a benevolent god cre- 
ated men on the slopes of the Andes, and that 
after a time another god, who was at enmity 
with the first, spitefully transformed them into 
insects. Here we have a contrary effect — it is 
the insects which have been transformed; the 
millions of wood-ants, let us say, inhabiting an 
old and exceedingly populous nest have been 
transformed into men, but in form only; men- 
tally they are still ants, all silently, everlast- 
ingly hurrying by, absorbed in their ant-busi- 
ness. You can almost smell the formic acid. 
Walking in the street, one of the swarming mul- 
titude, you are in but not of it. You are only 
one with the others in appearance; in mind you 
are as unlike them as a man is unlike an ant, 
and the love and sympathy you feel towards 



THE DEAD AND THE LIVING 325 

them Is about equal to that which you experience 
when looking down on the swarm in a wood- 
ants' nest. 

Undoubtedly when I am in the crowd, poi- 
soned by contact with the crowd-mind — the 
formic acid of the spirits — I am not actually or 
keenly conscious of the great gulf between me 
and the others, but, as in the former case, the 
sense of relief is experienced here too in escap- 
ing from it. The people of the small rustic 
community have not been de-humanised. I am a 
stranger, and they do not meet me with blank 
faces and pass on in ant-like silence. So great 
is the revulsion that I look on them as of my 
kin, and am so delighted to be with them again 
after an absence of centuries, that I want to em- 
brace and kiss them all. I am one of them, a 
villager with the village mind, and no wish for 
any other. 

This mind or heart includes the dead as well 
as the living, and the church and churchyard is 
the central spot and half-way house or camping- 
ground between this and the other world, where 
dead and living meet and hold communion — a 
fact that is unknown to or ignored by persons of 



326 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

the ''better class," the parish priest or vicar 
sometimes included. 

And as I have for the nonce taken on the vil- 
lage mind, I am as much interested in my incor- 
poreal, invisible neighbours as in those I see and 
am accustomed to meet and converse w^ith every 
day. They are here in the churchyard, and I 
am pleased to be with them. Even when I sit, 
as I sometimes do of an evening, on a flat tomb 
with a group of laughing children round me, 
some not yet tired of play, climbing up to my 
side only to jump down again, I am not oblivious 
of their presence. They are there, and are glad 
to see the children playing among the tombs 
where they too had their games a century ago. 
I notice that the village woman passing through 
the ground pauses a minute with her eyes resting 
on a certain spot; even the tired labourer, com- 
ing home to his tea, will let his eyes dwell on 
some green mound, to see sitting or standing 
there someone who in life was very near and 
dear to him, with whom he is now exchanging 
greetings. But the old worn-out labourer, who 
happily has not gone to end his days in captivity 
in the bitter Home of the Poor — he, sitting on 



THE DEAD AND THE LIVING 327 

a tomb to rest and basking In the sunshine, has 
a whole crowd of the vanished villagers about 
him. 

It is useless their telling us that when we die 
we are instantly judged and packed straight off 
to some region where we are destined to spend 
an eternity. We know better. Nature, our own 
hearts, have taught us differently. Furthermore, 
we have heard of the resurrection — that the 
dead will rise again at the last day; and with 
all our willingness to believe what pur masters 
tell us, we know that even a dead man can't be 
in two places at the same time. Our dead are 
here where we laid them; sleeping, no doubt, 
but not so soundly sleeping, we imagine, as not 
to see and hear us when we visit and speak to 
them. And being villagers still though dead, 
they like to see us often, whenever we have a few 
spare minutes to call round and exchange a few 
words with them. 

This extremely beautiful — and in its effect 
beneficial — feeling and belief, or instinct, or su- 
perstition if the superior inhabitants of the wood- 
ants' nest, who throw their dead away and 
think no more about them, will have it so — is a 



328 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

sweet and pleasant thing in the village life and 
a consolation to those who are lonely. Let me 
in conclusion give an instance. 

The churchyard I like best is situated in the 
village itself, and is in use both for the dead and 
living, and the playground of the little ones, but 
some time ago I by chance discovered one which 
was over half a mile from the village; an ancient 
beautiful church and churchyard which so 
greatly attracted me that in my rambles in that 
part I often went a mile or two out of my way 
just for the pleasure of spending an hour or two 
in that quiet sacred spot. It was in a wooded 
district in Hampshire, and there were old oak 
woods all round the church, with no other build- 
ing in sight and seldom a sound of human life. 
There was an old road outside the gate, but few 
used it. The tombs and stones were many and 
nearly covered with moss and lichen and half- 
draped in creeping ivy. There, sitting on a 
tomb, I would watch the. small woodland birds 
that made it their haunt, and listen to the deli- 
cate little warbling or tinkling notes, and admire 
the two ancient picturesque yew trees growing 
there. 



THE DEAD AND THE LIVING 329 

One day, while sitting on a tomb, I saw a 
woman coming from the village with a heavy 
basket on her head, and on coming to the gate 
she turned in, and setting the basket down 
walked to a spot about thirty yards from where 
I sat, and at that spot she remained for several 
minutes standing motionless, her eyes cast down, 
her arms hanging at her sides. A cottage 
woman in a faded cotton gown, of a common 
Hampshire type, flat-chested, a rather long oval 
face, almost colourless, and black dusty hair. 
She looked thirty-five, but was probably less 
than thirty, as women of their class age early in 
this county and get the toil-worn, tired face 
when still young. 

By-and-by I went over to her and asked her 
if she was visiting some of her people at that 
spot. Yes, she returned; her mother and father 
were buried under the two grass mounds at her 
feet; and then quite cheerfully she went on to 
tell me all about them — how all their other 
children had gone away to live at a distance 
from home, and she was left alone with them 
when they grew old and infirm. They were 
natives of the village, and after they were both 



330 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

dead, five years ago, she got a place at a farm 
about a mile up the road. There she had been 
ever since, but fortunately she had to come to 
the village every w^eek, and always on her way 
back she spent a quarter or half an hour with 
her parents. She was sure they looked for that 
weekly visit from her, as they had no other rela- 
tion in the place now, and that they liked to 
hear all the village news from her. 

All this and more she told me in the most open 
way. Like Wordsworth's "simple child," what 
could she know of death? But being a villager 
myself I was better informed than Wordsworth, 
and didn't enter on a ponderous argument to 
prove to her that when people die they die, and 
being dead, they can't be alive — therefore to pay 
them a weekly visit and tell them all the news 
was a mere waste of time and breath. 



XXXVII 
A STORY OF THREE POEMS 

I WROTE in the last sketch but one of the 
villager with a literary gift who composes 
the epitaphs in rhyme of his neighbours when 
they pass away and are buried in the church- 
yard. This has served to remind me of a kin- 
dred subject — the poetry or verse (my own in- 
cluded) of those who are not poets by profes- 
sion: also of an incident. Undoubtedly there is 
a vast difference between the village rhymester 
and the true poet, and the poetry I am now con- 
cerned with may be said to come somewhat be- 
tween these two extremes. Or to describe it in 
metaphor, it may be said to come midway be- 
tween the crow of the "tame villatic fowl" and 
the music of the nightingale in the neighbouring 
copse or of the skylark singing at heaven's gate. 
The impartial reader may say at the finish that 
the incident was not worth relating. Are there 
any such readers? I doubt it. I take it that we 

331 



332 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

all, even those who appear the most matter-of- 
fact in their minds and lives, have something of 
the root, the elements, of poetry in their compo- 
sition. How should it be otherwise, seeing that 
we are all creatures of like passions, all in some 
degree dreamers of dreams; and as we all pos- 
sess the faculty of memory we must at times 
experience emotions recollected in tranquillity. 
And that, our masters have told us, is poetry. 

It is hardly necessary to say that it is nothing 
of the sort: it is the elements, the essence, the 
feeling which makes poetry if expressed. I 
have a passion for music, a perpetual desire to 
express myself in music, but as I can't sing and 
can't perform on any musical instrument, I can't 
call myself a musician. The poetic feeling that 
is in us and cannot be expressed remains a secret 
untold, a warmth in the heart, a rapture which 
cannot be communicated. But it cries to be told, 
and in some rare instances the desire overcomes 
the difficulty: in a happy moment the unknown 
language is captured as by a miracle and the 
secret comes out. 

And, as a rule, when it has been expressed it 
is put in the fire, or locked up in a desk. By- 



A STORY OF THREE POEMS 333 

and-by the hidden poem will be taken out and 
read with a blush. For how could he, a prac- 
tical-minded man, with a wholesome contempt 
for the small scribblers and people weak in their 
intellectuals generally, have imagined himself a 
poet and produced this pitiful stuff! 

Then, too, there are others who blush, but 
with pleasure, at the thought that, without being 
poets, they have written something out of their 
own heads which, to them at all events, reads 
just like poetry. Some of these little poems find 
their way into an editor's hands, to be looked at 
and thrown aside in most cases, but occasionally 
one wins a place in some periodical, and my 
story relates to one of these chosen products — 
or rather to three. 

One summer afternoon, many years ago — but 
I know the exact date: July ist, 1897 — I was 
drinking tea on the lawn of a house at Kew, 
when the maid brought the letters out to her 
mistress, and she, Mrs. E. Hubbard, looking 
over the pile remarked that she saw the Selborne 
Magazine had come and she would just glance 
over it to see if it contained anything to interest 
both of us. 



334 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

After a minute or two she exclaimed "Why, 
here is a poem by Charlie Longman! How 
strange — I never suspected him of being a 
poet!" 

She was speaking of C. J. Longman, the pub- 
lisher, and it must be explained that he was an 
intimate friend and connection of hers through 
his marriage with her niece, the daughter of Sir 
John Evans the antiquary, and sister of Sir Ar- 
thur Evans. 

The poem was To the Orange-tip Butterfly. 

Cardamines I Cardamines ! 

Thine hour is when the thrushea sing, 
When gently stirs the vernal breeze, 

When earth and sky proclaim the spring; 
When all the fields melodious ring 

With cuckoos' calls, when all the trees 
Put on their green, then art thou king 

Of butterflies, Cardamines. 

What though thine hour be brief, for thee 

The storms of winter never blow, 
No autumn gales shall scorn the lea. 

Thou scarce shalt feel the summer's glow; 
But soaring high or flitting low, 
Or racing with the awakening bees 
For spring's first draughts of honey — so 

Thy life is passed, Cardamines. 



A STORY OF THREE POEMS 335 

Cardamines ! Cardamines ! 

E'en among mortal men I wot 
Brief life while spring-time quickly flees 

Might seem a not ungrateful lot: 
For summer's rays are scorching hot 

And autumn holds but summer's lees, 
And swift in autumn is forgot 

The winter comes, Cardamines. 

So well pleased were we with this little lyric 
that we read it aloud two or three times over to 
each other: for it was a hot summer's day when 
the early, freshness and bloom is over and the 
foliage takes on a deeper, almost sombre green; 
and it brought back to us the vivid spring feel- 
ing, the delight we had so often experienced on 
seeing again the orange-tip, that frail delicate 
flutterer, the loveliest, the most spiritual, of our 
butterflies. 

Oddly enough, the very thing which, one sup- 
poses, would spoil a lyric about any natural ob- 
ject — the use of a scientific instead of a popular 
name, with the doubling and frequent repetition 
of it — appeared in this instance to add a novel 
distinction and beauty to the verses. 

The end of our talk on the subject was a sug- 
gestion I made that it would be a nice act on 



336 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

her part to follow Longman's lead and write a 
little nature poem for the next number of the 
magazine. This she said she would do if I on 
my part would promise to follow her poem with 
one by me, and I said I would. 

Accordingly her poem, which I transcribe, 
made its appearance in the next number. 

MY MOOR 

Purple with heather, and golden with gorse, 
Stretches the moorland for mile after mile; 

Over it cloud-shadows float in their course, 
— Grave thoughts passing athwart a smile, — 

Till the shimmering distance, grey and gold, 

Drowns all in a glory manifold. 

O the blue butterflies quivering there, 

Hovering, flickering, never at rest, 
Quickened flecks of the upper air 

Brought down by seeing the earth so blest; 
And the grasshoppers shrilling their quaint delight 
At having been born in a world so bright! 

Overhead circles the lapwing slow, 

Waving his black-tipped curves of wings, 

Calling so clearly that I, as I go. 

Call back an answering "Peewit," that brings 

The sweep of his circles so low as he flies 

That I see his green plume, and the doubt in his ej'es. 



A STORY OF THREE POEMS 337 

Harebell and crowfoot and bracken and ling 

Gladden my heart as it beats all aglow 
In a brotherhood true with each living thing, 

From the crimson-tipped bee, and the chaffer slow, 
And the small lithe lizard, with jewelled eye, 
To the lark that has lost herself far in the sky. 

Ay me, where am I ? for here I sit 

With bricks all round me, bilious and brown; 

And not a chance this summer to quit 

The bustle and roar and the cries of town. 

Nor to cease to breathe this over-breathed air, 

Heavy with toil and bitter with care. 

Well, — face it and chase it, this vain regret; 

Which would I choose, to see my moor 
With eyes such as many that I have met. 

Which see and are blind, which all wealth leaves poor, 
Or to sit, brick-prisoned, but free within, 
Freeborn by a charter no gold can win? 

When my turn came, the poem I wrote, which 
duly appeared, was, like my friend's Moor, a 
recollected emotion, a mental experience re- 
lived. Mine was in the New Forest; when 
walking there on day, the loveliness of that green 
leafy world, its silence and its melody and the 
divine sunlight, so wrought on me that for a 
few precious moments it produced a mystical 
state, that rare condition of beautiful illusions 



338 A TRAVELLER IN LITTLE THINGS 

when the feet are off the ground, when, on some 
occasions, we appear to be one with nature, un- 
bodied like the poet's bird, floating, diffused 
in it. There are also other occasions when this 
transfigured aspect of nature produces the idea 
that we are in communion with or in the pres- 
ence of unearthly entities. 

THE VISIONARY 

I 

It must be true, I've somtimes thought, 
That beings from some realm afar 
Oft wander in the void immense, 
Flying from star to star. 

In silence through this various world, 
They pass, to mortal eyes unseen, 
And toiling men in towns know not 
That one with them has been. 

But oft, when on the woodland falls 
A sudden hush, and no bird sings; 
When leaves, scarce fluttered by the wind, 
Speak low of sacred things, 

My heart has told me I should know, 
In such a lonely place, if one 
From other worlds came there and stood 
Between me and the sun. 



A STORY OF THREE POEMS 339 

II 

At noon, within the woodland shade 
I walked and listened to the birds; 
And feeling glad like them I sang 
A low song without words. 

When all at once a radiance white, 
Not from the sun, all round me came; 
The dead leaves burned like gold, the grass 
Like tongues of emerald flame. 

The murmured song died on my lips; 
Scarce breathing, motionless I stood; 
So strange that splendour was! so deep 
A silence held the wood! 

The blood rushed to and from my heart, 
Now felt like ice, now fire in me. 
Till putting forth my hands, I cried, 
"O let me hear and see!" 

But even as I spake, and gazed 
Wide-eyed, and bowed my trembling knees, 
The glory and the silence passed 
Like lightning from the trees. 

And pale at first the sunlight seemed 
When it was gone ; the leaves were stirred 
To whispered sound, and loud rang out 
The carol of a bird. 



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